互联网邮件让我们远离了用笔写信的时代，加速了信息的传递！但是回想一下，你还记得上次用笔写信是什么时候么？可能是10年以前了？今天我们一起看看是谁带给了我们互联网邮件？练习雅思听力与阅读能力。

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Back in 1971, Tomlinson was a young engineer at the Boston firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman — known today as BBN Technologies. He’d been given a task: Figure out something interesting to do with ARPANET, the newborn computer network that was the predecessor of the modern-day Internet.

“We were working on ways in which humans and computers could interact,” he tells NPR’s Guy Raz. But instead, Tomlinson started tinkering with the interaction — or lack of it — between distant colleagues who didn’t answer their phones. He eventually found a way to send messages from one computer to another — inventing the system we now know as e-mail.

He began by sending messages between two computers in his office. “The keyboards were about 10 feet apart,” he remembers. “I could wheel my chair from one to the other and type a message on one, and then go to the other, and then see what I had tried to send.”

Unfortunately for posterity, Tomlinson doesn’t remember what was in that first e-mail. The test messages he sent to himself were often just gibberish — strings of characters or a few phrases from the Gettysburg Address. “The first E-mail is completely forgettable,” he says. “And, therefore, forgotten.”

By way of his invention, Tomlinson is also responsible for the elevation of the @ sign from symbol to icon. To send messages between different computers, he needed a way to separate the names of senders and recipients from the names of their machines. The @ sign just made sense; it wasn’t commonly used in computing back then, so there wouldn’t be too much confusion. The symbol turns an e-mail address into a phrase; it means “user ‘at’ host,” Tomlinson explains. “It’s the only preposition on the keyboard.”

Today, more than a billion people around the world type that @ sign every day. Tomlinson says that back in 1971, he did have some idea of the impact his invention would have.

“What I didn’t imagine was how quickly that would happen.”

原文引自： NPR