Here comes my second post! Andddd i'm gonna talk about EMAIL! Tadaaaa!
Okayyy *sigh*...
I bet many of us are so used to emails that we may potentially get bored when someone brings up such an obviously familiar topic.
BUT (okay there's a but here so i hope you guys are getting a bit more excited!)... But have you ever thought about how the symbol '@' goes inbetween the user's login name and the name of his or her host computer? Why '@' was chosen as the signature of email but not other symbols, for instance, '#, $, ^, &, *,...'? What was the first email message?, etc...
I guess not so many of us would ever get a hand on exploring about those stuffs. So that's why you should read today's blog entry as I will be covering fun facts about email!
To kickstart, I would like to introduce:
Father of Email: Raymond Samuel Tomlinson
Ray Tomlinson is a US computer engineer who implemented our email system in 1971 on ARPANET. In fact, Tomlinson had not been specifically tasked to develop email, but he was working out some useful applications for MIT's ARPANET project. Even though Tomlinson took some time to work on email , it was "mostly because it seemed like a neat idea". However, emails used across the APARNET network was actually turned out to be such a brilliant invention, since back in the days, messages could only be sent to those who used the same computer as the sender.
By using a file transfer protocol that he was working on called CYPNET to adapt the SNDMSG program, Tomlinson was the first person to be able to invent and send electronic messages to any computer on the ARPANET network. This has significantly increased the popularity of email as email is still considered as one of the most important killer apps of the internet.
---> and for those who don't know what ARPANET is, it is actually our first internet, or we can refer to it as PAPA of the internet - according to mr.Choy's joke in class, if you guys can remember haha!
The '@' Sign and Its Meaning
For most of us, '@' is so familiar that we may not bother to ponder its meaning. We use it numerous times everyday without giving it much thought as it has become an intergrate part of our lives. However, Ray Tomlinson deliberately chose the symbol '@' as a signature of email which is short for "at"to identify which user was "at" what computer. In other words,'@', which is an important part of our email address, can be refered to as our internet identity.
Technically, '@' helps seperate the user name from its host. To break it down, the host name (i.e: yahoo.com) helps signify the machine at which the user can be found, at least virtually. As a matter of fact, even though the host name functions just as same as the domain name, it is more specific than the domain name. Meanwhile, the user name typically is the name we use to log in.
The First Email: "QWERTYUIOP"?
In late 1971, Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers that were side-by-side in his Cambrigde, MA lab. He was sending test messages back and forth from one machine to the other until he was satisfied that the program worked. Even though, "QWERTYUIOP" is widely quoted to be our first email, Tomlinson described it as insignificant since "QWERTYUIOP" was the only message that he could recall in a bunch of forgettable test messages. Hence, "most likely the first message was QWERTYUIOP or something similar", he concluded.
Here are some other facts about email:
I think that's it for #week1's blog! I hope you guys have learnt something interesting about email beyond its technical function!
To round up everything, let's watch this youtube video:
And I'm so so so sorry since i couldn't insert this video into my blog and i dont know why so here's its link :(..
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