Ray Tomlinson (Amsterdam, New York state USA, 23 April 1941 – 5 March 2016) invented email in 1971. While working at a company in Massachusetts that had computers on the ARPANET (which morphed into the Internet we know), he thought it would be a good idea if employees were able to send messages to each other as well as files. He choose the ‘@’ sign separate the username from the machine (host) name which he added, enabling the system to distinguish a remote username from a local one.
Email wasn’t actually part of the actual project he was supposed to be working on… but it caught on very quickly because of its obvious benefits. Fast forward to now.. in 2015 it was estimated more than 200 billion emails are sent daily, but that number does include spam which actually makes up a large proportion (about half in 2015).
It is also estimated there are currently over 4 billion email addresses – unfortunately that doesn’t quite mean that more than half the planet’s population has email, as quite a few people have more than one email address, and also computer programs can have an email address of their own.
Tomlinson was co-author on an early standards document RFC-561: Standardizing Network Mail Headers (5 Sep 1973), which was one of the predecessors of the current email standard RFC-822: Standard for the format of ARPA Internet Text Messages (13 Aug 1982).
I played this game 3 or 4 times with my grade 4 son. He said he would enjoy it more…
Brad