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Email history
The chat does a great work with exception of the considerable fault that the texts were visible in practice for all users of the time shared computer. Naturally when there are colleagues there are gossips too and that is valid even for the Ministry of Defense of United States. But it is not a good breeding to gossip about the colleague from the left and he to be able to read everything. The need of personalized messages becomes more and more tangible.
Probably the chit-chat was great tit-bit to raise the idea that it is possible every user to have its own file in which everybody could write but only the user has access to read. When you record on file you are sure that the file owner will read your message. The defect of this kind of mail was the lack of history (as this thing sounds more as an advantage having in mind our current point of view). More or less this system worked quite well till the moment when ARPAnet became bigger. But after a time it grows tired of gossiping one and the same things with one and the same people. It would be nice if it is possible to chat with the colleagues form the other towns and networks. What a variety, what a thrill to talk about the stinking feet of a man who never met with a mate who know only by spelling mistakes.
Unfortunately the existing “file system” was unworkable – surely someone will also put his file the strictly individualized name “myfile.txt”. The idea flashed into the mind of Ray Tomlinson who thinks of some extension of the main file. It is clear that at one computer it is not possible to exist two files with exact filenames or two users with same usernames. So if we assume that in the place of file we address to a user and we show where exactly this user is hosted we will have an unique user name. Explaining his idea to the colleagues, Ray Tomlinson uses the example “username at computer name”. Typically Tomlinson abbreviate the lavishly long word “at” replacing it with the distorted symbol @ and thanks to that he made the tailed “a” the most popular abbreviation of all times.
In 1971 in Cambridge, Ray Tomlinson sent a message from one computer to another. The computers were and one and the same room and even were sitting right one to another but Tomlinson used ARPAnet. This simple operation take a place into the history just because the first email was sent.
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