The anatomy of e-mail

History and Evolution of Electronic mail

The History
In 1957, at the heights of the Cold War, the Soviet Union scored one against the United States when it successfully put in place the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. To up the ante with the Soviets, the US Department of Defense set up a division dedicated to extreme technology research, ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency), which later fashioned ARPANET. For the first time in history, computers were able to exchange information electronically.

 How it works?

Evolution

1969 The birth of ARPANET, the precursor to today’s Internet, designed for sharing research among scientists. The system crashed at the first login!

1971 Ray Tomlinson sends the first e-mail

1979 Emoticons bring life into otherwise boring computer newsgroup

1982 TCP/IP, where the Internet owes its true origins, is invented

1984 William Gibson coins the world cyberspace in his book Neuromancer

1991 The WWW is officially created by Tim Berner-Lee. He created the first www protocol at CERN, Switzerland

1993 The world’s first graphical Web browser, Mosaic, is released to the public and the concept of ‘surfing’ comes to life

1996 40 million people are online in more than 150 countries around the world

2000 Over 4 billion e-mail per day are sent in the world. Over 1 billion Web sites exist on the Internet. Every day, 7 million new pages are added!

2001 1.8 billion pages on the Web, with over half on them in the English Language

2005 Worldwide, the number of e-mail boxes will grow to 1.2 billion from 505 million in 2000



Not a bed of roses!
The sheer freedom and flexibility that e-mail offered has made it the number one application used on the Internet. But with the fruits of e-mail also come the pits of invasion. In its early days, e-mail was a very safe means of sending messages since the e-mail itself consisted mostly of text. But once e-mail was capable of carrying attachments, malicious hackers started using it to send Viruses, Trojans and Worms.

As if this isn’t enough to face users to take a cautions approach towards e-mail, things get nastier with the abuse of unsolicited e-mail, spam. Named after the tins of American “SPiced hAM”, for each legitimate message send across the Net, there seems to be a disproportionately higher amount of spam filled with promises of getting filthy rich, shedding pounds off your waist, and buying fabulous offers that you can’t afford to miss.


Commerce takes a twist
The growth of e-mail has had a profound influence on enterprise. Documents, visual designs and just about any piece of business correspondence can be sent instantly, and at much lower costs than overnight delivery services. E-mail has provided a grand replacement for telephone calls in many instances. What’s more, as this medium is so informal, one doesn’t have to worry about composing grammatically correct words and sentences.

Since there is no paper involved, the storing and retrieval of message becomes much easier and quicker with less space consumed.
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