Nobody tried to invent the e-mail. It simply happened. In 1969 an American, Ray Tomlinson, was working on two projects at the same time. Firstly, he was working on a programmer called SNDMSG ( send message).With that programmer the people in his company were able to leave messages for each other. The second project was a file-transfer programmer(CYPNET). With that programmer users were able to send files between linked computers.
Suddenly Tomlinson had an idea. «If I put the two programmers together, I may be able to send messages, not just files, to other computers. «The idea worked and quickly became popular.
Tomlinson invented e-mail addresses too. These have two parts: the name of the user and the name of the host (the computer) .He chose the "commercial at" symbol and combined the user and host names. For example:
[email protected] (миша инин на компьютере лукинск.ру) .the decision to take the @ symbol took Tomlinson only thirty or forty seconds.
The new system grew quickly and soon it became network e-mail. Nowadays users pass messages between billions of different computers. People send e-mails more often than they make telephone calls. So Ray Tomlinson gave us one of the greatest means of communication in history. He is still working as a programmer and he doesn`t think that the e-mail was the greatest thing he has done in his life. "I have done more difficult and useful things that took me years", he says THE E-MAIL TOOK JUST A COUPLE OF DAYS.