PASCAL Platinum 6th Edition

ICTThe History of EmailEmail is by far and away the most popular application on the internet. Just about everyone uses email, andgenerally people use it all of the time.It all began in 1968 with a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). This firm was hired by the UnitedStates Defense Department to create something called the ARPANET, which later became the internet.ARPANET stands for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, and its purpose was to create a method thatmilitary and educational institutions could communicate with each other.In 1971, an engineer named RayTomlinson was assigned to aproject called SNDMSG. Thisprogram was not new; in fact ithad existed for a number of years.By today's standards it was morethan primitive. All it did was allowusers on the same machine tosend messages to each other.Users could create text files whichwould then be delivered tomailboxes on the same machine.A mailbox was simply a text filewhich could have additional textadded to the end. Data could beadded, but not deleted or changed. The name of the mailbox was the name of the text file.Ray was assigned to make this simple application do little bit more. As it turned out, he had been working onsomething called CYPNET, which was intended to transfer files between computers within the ARPANET. "Theidea occurred to me that CYPNET could append material to a mailbox file as readily as SNDMSG could," saidRay. So he modified CYPNET to perform one additional task -to append to a file. This was pretty simple and thechange was quickly made.After that, Ray made a decision which changed history. He created the format of the email address. He definedit as a mailbox name, the @ sign, and the machine's node name. He used the @ sign because "it seemed tomake sense. I used the @ sign to indicate that the user was 'at' some other host rather than being local."He sent himself a message, the contents of which have been lost in time. The first email message wasunceremoniously sent between two PDP-10 nodes of the ARPANET network. History had been made.Email usage grew quickly. In fact, a study two years later found that 75% of all ARPANET traffic was email.One of the first big email programs available to the general public (at least the first major one to catch on) isEudora. This email client was first written in1988 by Steve Dorner. At the time he was an employee at theUniversity of Illinois.Eudora was named for the now deceased Eudora Welty, an author from America. Eudora was the first emailclient which provided a graphic interface. It was free when it first came out; although once it was purchased byQualcomm in 1994 it became a professional product.Like most applications on the web, Eudora was king for a few years, then quickly supplanted by the emailclients that came with Netscape and Internet Explorer. Both email clients became popular not because theywere better than Eudora, but because they were provided for free with the web browser.Rafael Efstathiou, 5APASCAL Platinum 6th Edition 31