In my email today, I got an email from my friend Jim about…..yep…email. The article from the BBC News introduces us to Ray Tomlinson, the man responsible for the email revolution. In 1971, he developed the code that enabled him to send an e-mail between two computers for the first time. Ray's aim was to make it possible to communicate between computers. His creation was a short, 200-line program, to which he added the @ symbol.
Electronic mail was born. A paperless, near-instant form of communication was created.
We all know the downside of this technology. It's too easy to write an e-mail and hit the send button (we've all done that, right?). And when an e-mail goes wrong, it can be around the world in 80 seconds and headline news the next day (well, that I have never done...yet).
On average, we spend 52 hours a year just dealing with our junk mail. That's not something that Ray Tomlinson anticipated. "Spam is a problem," he admits.
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