Luca Manunza, The Sardinian Of The Webmail 0 Comments

In 1995, the internet was already widely used but to manage one or more email accounts thirty years ago a special program had to be installed on the computer. A young Sardinian researcher from CRS4 (Centre for Research, Development and Higher Studies in Sardinia), Luca Manunza, trying to solve a practical problem, which would allow his colleagues and other researchers to read email messages in a simpler and faster way, had the right intuition: the webmail which would allow the email to read email messages directly via the browser, an internet navigator.

In an interview years later, Manunza said: “several people in the world were working on a project similar to mine and more or less we all reached the finish line together. Compared to the others, I had the merit of being the first to use the term webmail, which then became universally used."

We see that the idea has had worldwide success every day when, with extreme ease, we send and receive an email. Manunza's new system was tested by the most important companies, such as Apple, the New York Times and NASA. In fact, the webmail source code was made freely available to everyone on Usenet, a widely used worldwide network.

Manunza, after an experience at Video On Line, Sardinia, where he improved the first version of webmail, in 1999 moved to the then Tiscali, an Italian telecommunications company born in Sardinia, where he very successfully implemented a webmail with 10 million of active users across Europe. Tiscali S.p.A., today Tessellis S.p.A., listed on the stock exchange and now on the international market, was created in 1998 by the Sardinian entrepreneur Renato Soru. The company was named after the Tiscali Sardinian Mountain, located between the municipalities of Dorgali and Oliena (Nuoro Province), where there are the remains of the Tiscali's Nuragic Village dating back to the 6th-4th century BC, of ​​which we have already written in our blog.

Therefore, Sardinia is also including, among its proud Sardinian people, the inventor of webmail, which allows us every day to manage files, receive and send e-mail messages, with all its immense treasure of additional services of our use, since The Internet has moved, from a market segment to store technical and scientific data, to means of mass communication and information, continuously expanding its use.

“The digital revolution is such because technology has become an environment to be inhabited, an extension of the human mind, a world that is intertwined with the real world and which determines real rearrangement of cognitive, emotional and social experience, capable of redefining the construction of identity and relationships..." (Tonino Cantelmi)

Written by Daniela Toti