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Email: Keeping in Touch From the Stone Age to the present, people have shown a desire to send messages to one another over long distances.
In ancient times, according to one story, a chain of fires on mountaintops was used to relate the news of the fall of Troy to people in Greece. In the past, native people in the Americas used smoke from fires to transmit messages. They developed a code—in which certain combinations of smoke rising had special meanings. For example, two parallel columns of smoke indicated the successful return of a war party.
The ancient Greeks established lines of signal towers at mountain-tops. At each one, a large fire was lit to transmit a signal to the next tower, and in this way, information was passed on through the land. Also, almost anything that makes a noise has been used for signaling. A kind of drum talk is still used in Central Africa today, although few who are not natives have been able to understand it. The sender uses a drum that can produce a high or low tone. Because the local dialect alternates in these tones, the sender is able to simulate speech with the drums.
In modern times, people have communicated by letter, telegraph, and telephone. But no one method has become as widespread as quickly as the use of email. The first email message took place in 1971, and according to its sender, Ray Tomlinson, it was probably the following: "QWERTYUIOP." What was significant about that? Nothing, really. This is just the top row of keys on an English-language keyboard.
Tomlinson was just testing out the system and using a nonsense message. He had no concept that he was going to start a revolution in communication.
Tomlinson was one of a group of scientists who were working on developing better computers. The scientists at his site were able to send a message to a "mailbox" on the computer on their site. Other scientists could view the messages in the mailbox. But there were other computers at other sites where scientists were working on the same project. Tomlinson's idea was to figure out a way to deliver messages to mailboxes on those remote computers. He used the @ sign to identify messages that were headed out of the local machine to the more distant ones. That was the start of the emailing systems that we still use
At first, the number of people on email was small, but by the end of the 20th century, there were 263 million email boxes. In the 21st century, that figure has grown to over 4 billion, and the functions of email services in the future will become more and more diversified. And text messaging on cell phones is also increasing, so people can, in effect, be in constant touch with people who are long distances away.