The Beginning
§The Internet's surge in growth in the mid 1990s was dramatic, increasing a
hundredfold in 1995 and 1996 alone. There were two reasons. Up
until then, the major online services (AOL, CompuServe, etc.) provided e-mail, but only to customers of the
same service. As they began to connect to the Internet for e-mail exchange, the Internet took on the role of a
global switching center. An AOL member could finally send mail
to a CompuServe member, and so on. The Internet glued the world together for electronic mail,
and today, SMTP, the Internet mail protocol, is the global e-mail standard.
