SYV-Online - Do you know these little-known facts?

Nov 19, 2008
2:20 PM

QUESTION OF THE DAY:

[Computers]: Who invented email?
ANSWER:

Ray Tomlinson, an engineer working at Bolt Beranek and Newman, a consulting and software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, created a "hack" program called "readmail" in 1971. (A "hack" program is one that is for fun, or at least just a test of an idea.)
The idea caught fire, and within a year everyone on the (then) new Internet was using his program. Of special interest was his choice of format for email addresses: name@location. He was originally working with an old teletype terminal that used the "at-sign" (@) to mean the location of the target email. The part before the @ was a user name, and the part following was a computer name.

The US government invested millions of dollars in the "ARPANET", which was to provide the capability of massive computing capabilities among Universities around the country. Little did they know that "email" (human communication) would be the predominant benefactor of the effort.

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