From QWERTYUIOP to NFT

This week I read that 2021 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first email being sent. It is incredible that that was just two years after Neil Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon, because while the Apollo 11 moon landing now feels like ancient history, the email seems a much more recent innovation.

Ray Tomlinson (pictured below), sent the first email, and the content was apparently something like “QWERTYUIOP,” which, for banality, even beats the first words spoken over the telephone. In 1876, in his first phone call, Alexander Graham Bell addressed his assistant, Mr Watson, thus: “Mr Watson--come here--I want to see you." As an aside, Bell’s preferred usage when answering a phone call was “Ahoy,” which is much better than “Hello” in my view, and a greeting that should be instated as mandatory when answering calls.

It was not until more than twenty years after Ray Tomlinson sent the first one that I became aware of the existence of email. In the early to mid-1990s, home computers were not commonplace, those who did own one probably didn’t have access to the internet, and even at work we relied on more mundane methods of communication than email.

At that time, written communication within the bank that I worked for (HSBC) was by internal memo or fax. With external customers, it was mostly letters, with some faxes, and for banks abroad, SWIFT or telex messages. I first encountered email in 1997 when I was seconded to an IT department, where my manager had an email account. I was delegated by him to send the occasional email on his behalf and although I don’t now remember what system was used, it certainly did not feature the GUI we take for granted today. Instead, it looked something very much like this (except the text was green).

Within the bank, email accounts were like gold dust, and not to be doled out willy-nilly. It was some time before I was deemed worthy of having one, and the email client used by then was Lotus Notes, with its nice, user-friendly interface. I was privileged to be granted an email account that allowed me external access as we dealt with an external software provider, but many staff had to be content with internal email only.

Today, Gmail is the most popular email provider with 1.5 billion active users worldwide, but my first personal email account was with Force9, our first internet service provider (ISP). That first email account ran through Windows Mail on the desktop. Not being a webmail product, it was limited to the one machine we owned, but that didn’t matter as accessing emails on other, more portable devices like phones and tablets was years in the future.

My first email address was, due to a misunderstanding on my part when I created it, a bit of a mouthful; reading it out to people (over the phone for example) was always something of a trial and necessarily accompanied by an explanation of how it was constructed. I’ve since migrated from Force9 to Gmail with a more practical address, but my old account remains active for legacy reasons. Thanks to Force9 having apparently done nothing to improve their email offering in the last thirty years, it is painfully slow, and the only effective way I can still access my inbox is by having Gmail automatically fetch messages.

Our email addresses are now about so much more than just sending and receiving messages; we use them as our logon names for many applications, hence the need for a unique and strong email password to mitigate the risk of credential stuffing attacks. Our emails and their addresses enable us to access tickets for transport, shows, and sporting events for instance, which is why email is one of the most important pieces of technology we have, including on our mobile phones. In fact, the least important piece of functionality on our mobile phones these days is the ability to make and receive telephone calls; perhaps the day will come when we buy phones without a voice call function, or at least with the ability to disable it.

Smartphone functionality – and in particular the range of apps that they can offer – means that apart from rarely leaving the house without mine, I actually need to carry much less when I go out that I did perhaps even a year ago. For instance, I take my wallet out with me but rarely remove a card or cash from it; I use my phone instead, particularly now that the Tesco Pay+ app allows me to spend up to £250, contactless.

In 2019 I bought a ticket for a Steven Wilson gig at The O2, scheduled for September 2020. Paperless it was, using the AXS app. To use the ticket I had to have a smartphone with a 4G signal, with location services enabled, with date and time set to automatic, the AXS app running with the most recent release installed, and the brightness of the screen at a certain level. Covid put paid to the gig, so I didn’t get the chance to suffer the stress of worrying that one of those conditions might not be met and that I’d fail to get into the gig as a result. Or, more mundanely, that my phone battery might die, or I might lose the device en route to the venue.

I’ve been to gigs where I’ve used the Dice app to buy my ticket, and with that app, the QR code representing the admission ticket appears on the phone around two hours before the gig (it’s a tactic that is supposed to reduce the possibility of ticket touting), and that’s a little bit of stress added to the mix right there, being practically at the venue but not having the ticket – yet.

Even where tickets are not held in an app, buying them online and having them delivered by email is now the norm, and even though there is the option to show the ticket on your smartphone, I tend to prefer physically printing it out, because although I am happy to embrace technology, there still remains a risk – no matter how small – of it failing at the crucial moment.

Perhaps, like me, you’ve experienced the minor inconvenience of being out of the house and finding that an app you want to use has logged you out and you can’t remember the password (I checked, and I have 170 separate logons and passwords, and no I can’t remember them all). Fortunately, when it’s happened to me it hasn’t been anything crucial, but one day, it might be.

And that is just one potential flaw with smartphones and our reliance on emails and apps; we risk putting all of our eggs in one basket. When – and I hope it is soon – I can go to gigs again, the last thing I want is to be refused entry because I can’t access the ticket on my phone.

Sooner or later though, even the e-ticket, or the ticket on an app, will become old hat. The next big thing in ticketing could be Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT), which use blockchain functionality. I hope it is less complex than it sounds.