The first Swedish e-mail: "Hello"
At two minutes past 2pm on April 7, 1983, Björn Eriksen receives the first ever e-mail sent over the internet to Sweden.
Björn Eriksen.
It's from Amsterdam and Jim McKie at the European Unix Network. The content is perhaps not very exciting, but it's still a historic moment. E-mail has since become the most used form of communication over the internet. In 2019 over 97% of Swedish internet users were using e-mail according to the report "Swedes and the internet":
The full text of the e-mail:
SWE_Mail
Return-Path:
Date: Thu, 7 Apr 83 14:02:08 MET DST
From: mcvax!jim (Jim McKie)
To: enea!ber
Subject: Hello
You are now hooked to the mcvax. This is just a test. Reply, we will be calling you again soon!
Ignore any references to a machine called "yoorp", it is just a test. Mail should go to mcvax!….".
Regards, Jim McKie. (mcvax!jim).
Björn received the e-mail on a VAX 780 running the BSD Unix operating system, placed at the software company Enea Data AB in Täby, Stockholm. The e-mail is transported using UUCP and X.25 (not TCP/IP, which has made some people question whether this can really be considered the first e-mail sent over "internet"). E-mail has at this time been sent from Sweden, via the KOM system in 1982, but over a network bridge (and with X.25).
A few years later, Björn Eriksen registers the .se top-level domain and handles it until 1997. He passed away in 2005. Here is a movie where his friends and colleagues talk about his work (in Swedish only):
The world's first e-mail was sent over ten years earlier
The first ever e-mail was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson. This e-mail he sends to himself, from one computer to another right next to each other.
