When Alexander Graham Bell sent the first telephone message on March 10, 1876, he was not only well aware of the date, he had someone on hand to record his words ("Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.") The man knew he was making history.
By contrast, when a U.S. computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the world's first inter-machine e-mail message about this time of year 30 years ago, he failed to note the day, or even the exact month, and kept no record of the text. "I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to another," he says now. "Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP. . . . The only thing I know [is] it was all in upper case."
Mr. Tomlinson rightly notes that the pace of progress has accelerated so much since men like Bell and Samuel Morse and Guglielmo Marconi made their revolutionary breakthroughs -- the phone, the telegram and the precursor of radio -- that the individuals responsible for the big breakthroughs of the latter-day computer age go virtually unnoticed. People vaguely recall the 19th-century Englishman Charles Babbage and his mechanical "difference engine," arguably the first computer of any kind, and his compatriot Alan Turing, who in the 1930s developed a blueprint for the electronic digital computer. But how many have heard of Dr. Ed Roberts of Georgia, who built the first personal computer back in 1975 (and once employed a young Bill Gates)? How many carefree surfers know the name of Mr. Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who fathered the World Wide Web 10 years ago?