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The same may be true of the story of the telephone. Most 6th graders can well recount Alexander Graham Bells telephonic trek into history with the now legendary summons to his assistant on March 10, 1876: “Mr. Watson, come here; I want you.”
Likewise, I’m sure they would know all about the blustery day of December 12, 1901, when Guglielmo Marconi and his assistants heard the faint transmission from across the Atlantic: dot, dot,
The birth of email, however, was something quite less dramatic and it’s inventor, almost an unknown.
Sent by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971, the first email was simply a test message to himself. "I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other," he recalls.
"The test messages were entirely forgettable.” The email was sent via ARPANET from one computer to another computer sitting right beside it in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Tomlinson had been playing around with two programs called SNDMSG and R
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used e-mail several times a day in the autumn of 1976. Pop-up windows alert the recipient whenever new email has arrived. What was a tool for a closed group of scientists 30 years ago, has become a staple of industry and a household
convenience.
Also the power of the carbon copy (CC) cannot be underestimated. "After we delivered the enhanced version of SNDMSG to other sites, (so that there was someone out there to talk to) virtually all my communication was via e-mail”, he remembers. Use email to praise employees publicly, to gather input, to brainstorm, to create a feeling of community and collaborate between remote sites. The events of September 11 have uncovered email trails used by Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.
Brian Krebs’ August 2000 article in Newsbytes News Network tells of a sure sign that email has become a true part of the American landscape. A new and super-fast email scanning system employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Carnivore covertly scans emails to uncover criminal activity and capture those who commit terrorist acts. When he is remembered at all, it is as the man who picked @ as the locator symbol in electronic addresses. But for a political campaign this was a revolutionary stroke in communications.
I recently CC-ed the President of My University with a problem that had not been resolved for over 2 months; the problem was resolved within 20 minutes of that email. He applied the idea behind
these programs to a third program called CYPNET, the combined technology allowed people to send and receive files that could be appended between different machines. In truth though, he is the inventor of e-mail, the application that launched the digital information revolution. Spam Filtering is a much-appreciated feature, which weeds out unwanted or unsolicited emails.
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