Page 5 - Account Security Lockdown
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Brief Email History
Email itself is much older than even ARPANet or the Internet. It was never
actually invented; it simply evolved from very simple beginnings.
Early email was just a small advance on what we know these days as a file
directory - it just put a message in another user's directory in a spot where they
could see it when they logged in. Simple as that. Just like leaving a note on
someone's desk.
Probably the first email system of this type was MAILBOX, used at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology from 1965. Another early program to send messages on
the same computer was called SNDMSG.
Some of the mainframe computers of this era might have had up to one hundred
users -often they used what are called "dumb terminals" to access the mainframe
from their work desks. Dumb terminals just connected to the mainframe - they
had no storage or memory of their own, they did all their work on the remote
mainframe computer.
Before internet-working began, therefore, email could only be used to send
messages to various users of the same computer. Once computers began to talk
to each other over networks, however, the problem became a little more complex
- We needed to be able to put a message in an envelope and address it. To do
this, we needed a means to indicate to whom letters should go that the electronic
posties understood - just like the postal system, we needed a way to indicate an
address.
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