Why did he call it Eudora? Dorner explained for a 1997 article in the New York Times CyberTimes that it was because of a short story he had read in college: “ Why I Live at the P.O,” by Mississippi writer Eudora Welty. Like many university-produced programs, it was available to anyone for free. It took Dorner just over a year to create the first version of Eudora, which had 50,000 lines of C code and ran only on the Apple Macintosh. It was something that you logged in to some mainframe computer to do, and with the ease of use that the desktop operating systems brought, that just wasn’t the right way for people to do email anymore.” We began it because the internet was a growing and burgeoning place, but email was not really established on the desktop computers that people were using at the time. “I started Eudora in 1988, at the University of Illinois, about four years before I came to Qualcomm. In the 1980s, Steve Dorner was working at the computer center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With thanks to Qualcomm, we are pleased to release the Eudora source code for its historical interest, and with the faint hope that it might be resuscitated.
I still use it today, but, alas, the last version of Eudora was released in 2006. In my opinion it was the finest email client ever written, and it has yet to be surpassed. Eudora was elegant, fast, feature-rich, and could cope with mail repositories containing hundreds of thousands of messages.
Available both for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh, in its heyday Eudora had tens of millions of happy users.
In the 1980s, the Post Office Protocol for TCP/IP codified the communication between email clients (which run on the user’s computer) and the email server (where messages are received from other systems and stored), so that there could be independent implementations of both on different computers and operating systems.Įventually many email clients were written for personal computers, but few became as successful as Eudora. The first email on the ARPANET (the predecessor of today’s internet) was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, and mail formats became standardized ( RFC 524, RFC 561) soon thereafter. These early systems, which often used propriety communications networks and protocols, were generally incompatible with each other you could only exchange mail with people using the same system. By now billions of people have used email.Įmail has a long and storied history, dating back to MIT’s Compatible Time Sharing System ( CTSS) and the US government’s AUTODIN in the early 1960s. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. Software Gems: The Computer History Museum Historical Source Code SeriesĮlectronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing.
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