You may have received an email from someone claiming to be royalty and wanting to give you millions of dollars. If so, you probably recognized it as a scam and deleted it. There is one email from a royal, however, that you wouldn’t want to delete. It would have come from Elizabeth II, and it didn’t start with the words, “Greetings, I am the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland and I wish to deposit vast sums of money into your personal account.”

The occasion was March 26th, 1976. The Queen opened the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire. The UK’s Ministry of Defence and the United States Department of Defense were collaborating on the development of a future standard programming language. The result would be known as Ada. The collaboration began by providing mutual access to the Department of Defense ARPANET, which was the precursor to the internet.

The begin the collaboration and to usher in a new milestone in the Information Age, the Queen transmitted an electronic message to the US Secretary of Defense. In so doing, the Queen accomplished yet another of her many “firsts” as monarch; she sent the first royal email.