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E-mail, or email, is short for " electronic mail" (as opposed to conventional mail, in this context also called snail mail) and is a method of composing, sending, and receiving messages over electronic communication systems. Most e-mail systems today use the Internet, and e-mail is one of the most popular uses of the Internet.

1 Origins of e-mail

Despite common belief, e-mail actually pre-dates the Internet; in fact, existing e-mail systems were a crucial tool in creating the Internet.

E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate; although the exact history is murky, among the first systems to have such a facility were SDC's Q32 and MIT's CTSS.

E-mail was quickly extended to become network e-mail, allowing users to pass messages between different computers. The early history of network e-mail is also murky; the AUTODIN system may have been the first allowing electronic text messages to be transferred between users on different computers, in 1966, but it is possible the SAGE system had something similar some time before.

The ARPANET computer networkA computer network is a system for communication among two or more computers. Categorizing By range personal area network (PAN) wireless PAN local area network (LAN) wireless LAN metropolitan area network (MAN) wide area network (WAN) By functional relati made a major contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one report [1] which indicates experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after its creation, in 1969For other uses, see Number 1969. For the movie, see 1969 (movie). Events January January 1 Australian media baron Rupert Murdoch purchases the largest selling British Sunday newspaper The News Of The World January 5 The Derry Riots leave over 100 people i. Ray TomlinsonRaymond Tomlinson (born 1941) is a programmer who first used the "@" symbol for sending email in 1972. External link Tomlinson, Ray. initiated the use of the @ signNot to be confused with commercial art. A commercial at also called an at symbol an at sign or just at is a symbolic abbreviation for the word at''. Its formal name comes from its commercial use in invoices, as in, "7 widgets @ £2 ea. It is also known as to separate the names of the user and their machine in 19721972 is a leap year starting on Saturday (click link for calendar). Events January events January 2 the Pierre Hotel Heist Six men rob the safety deposit boxes of the Pierre Hotel in New York City. Loot is at least $4 million January 5 President of the Un. The common report that he "invented" e-mail is an exaggeration, although his early e-mail programs SNDMSGSNDMSG was one component of a mail program written by Ray Tomlinson that was first used in 1971 for TENEX. The other component was READMAIL. SNDMSG was used for the purpose of sending Electronic Mail from one user to another, however, it was not capable o and READMAIL were very important. The ARPANet significantly increased the popularity of e-mail, and it became the "killer app" of the ARPANET.

2 Growing popularity

As the utility and advantages of e-mail on the ARPANET became more widely known, the popularity of e-mail increased, leading to demand from people who were not allowed access to the ARPANET. A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCPUUCP stands for Unix to Unix Copy Protocol and is a computer program and protocol allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email and netnews between Unix computers not connected to the Internet proper. The UUCP package consists of seve and IBMThis article is about the International Business Machines Corporation; see IBM (disambiguation) for other uses of this abbreviation. International Business Machines Corporation IBM or colloquially, Big Blue (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since's VNET e-mail system.

Since not all computers or networks were directly inter-networked, e-mail addresses had to include the "route" of the message, that is, a path between the computer of the sender and the computer of the receivers. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including the ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNET, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.

The route was specified using so-call "bang path" addresses, specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each hop is signified by a "bang sign", i.e. "!". Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me directs people to route their mail to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox.

Before auto-routing mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see glob) to give paths from several big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost.





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