PM Modi Claimed He Sent An Email In 1988 But How Could He If VSNL Started In 1995?

During a video interviewed released some days ago, PM Narendra Modi said that he took pictures using a digital camera in 1988 and sent them via email. Now, let’s take a closer look into what his claim and check whether the timeline of technology innovation and the milestones match.

Firstly, back in 1988, the Internet did not exist. The US developed the first networking tool at the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET); and in the early 1970s, there were just a few network systems. It was not until 1977 that researchers managed to build a packet-switching system to establish connection and interaction between these networks.

In 1978, the first TCP/IP emerged. Then, over most of the years, we were on the Internet, we used IPv4. Then when ARPANET was finally linked with networks across the world, the Internet began to really take form, connecting computers globally.

Eventually, in 1991, the Internet was made public for the first time, hence its entrance in Asia, including India. August 14, 1995, was the day India’s general public got access to the Internet thanks to VSNL (Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited).

However, the first email was sent in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, a computer programmer and an inventor. As part of ARPA’s internal project, Tomlinson sent an email to himself. But the email couldn’t be saved and its content only included the text “QWERTYUIOP.” Also, he was the first one to use “@” for specifying an address to send an internal message.

In the mid-1990s, the first email hosting services emerged, including Yahoo, Hotmail, Echomail, and America Online (AOL). In 1994, Phillip Hallam-Baker created the first webmail client at CERN, two years after which, Hotmail was founded. At launch, the service gave users only 2MB of storage, which means they couldn’t attach photos to their emails back then.

But even before the Internet, there were already networks connected with each other around the world. ERNET was one of those, with the presence of DoE, the National Center for Software Technology (NCST) of Bombay, IISc Bangalore, and the five IITs (Madras, Kharagpur, Kanpur, Delhi, and Bombay).  With no ISPs in 1986, these institutions made used of a dial-up link to send and receive emails from other academics and companies across the globe.

So, it’s possible that PM Modi could access an institution and managed to send an email from a political rally. But there’s also a chance that the Prime Minister misspoke between “email” and “internet.”

On the other hand, the Fuji DS-1P was the first digital camera, made in 1988, but it never went on sale. The first digital camera to go commercial was the Logitech Fotoman in 1990. That was two years after the time Modi claimed he took a shot and sent via email.

How’s that possible?