They prefer to use Norse code!

This stupid joke had me searching for when the first email ever sent was (I’m, uh, well aware there is a significant time gap between Vikings and Computers). Turns up as:

Sometime in late 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message. “I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other,” he recalls now. “The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar.”