COM 125 Assignment Week 2 : There is No Distance...

The internet has much evolved since it first began more than a decade ago. Of course, its history spans even further back than the 1990s. An average engineer named Douglas Engelbart, thought of the idea of the computer actually functioning to help people think faster, and find solutions to problems easier and quicker. From that idea, things started to work as planned for Engelbart. “By the 1990s, as a direct result of Engelbart's crusade, tens of millions of people around the world use computers and telecommunications to extend their abilities to think and communicate.” (http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/3.html, 2007) Thus the internet was born, but that is another story for another time.

With the birth of the internet, where information can be shared to almost everyone who has a personal computer with an internet connection, many other web-based programs sprouted as well, programs that we take for granted today. Take email for example. “E-mail started in 1965 as a way for multiple users of a time-sharing mainframe computer to communicate.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Internet&oldid=70771572, 2007) It was around even before the internet started out. Compared to “MSN Hotmail” of today, this was a very primitive form of email. In that era, email could only be passed on to one another, only if the users were on the same net. At that time, there was no “World Wide Web”. There were different servers, for example: ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet. However, things changed soon after the internet started to plow its way through the world. “The ARPANET computer network made a large contribution to the evolution of e-mail. There is one report indicating experimental inter-system e-mail transfers on it shortly after ARPANET's creation. In 1971 Ray Tomlinson created what was to become the standard Internet e-mail address format, using the @ sign to separate user names from host names. A number of protocols were developed to deliver e-mail among groups of time-sharing computers over alternative transmission systems, such as UUCP and IBM's VNET e-mail system. E-mail could be passed this way between a number of networks, including ARPANET, BITNET and NSFNet, as well as to hosts connected directly to other sites via UUCP.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_Internet&oldid=70771572, 2007)

In 1980, the medium we call the “World Wide Web” was created. “The World Wide Web ("WWW" or simply the "Web") is a global information medium which users can read and write via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet itself, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, as e-mail does.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=History_of_the_World_Wide_Web&oldid=73974490, 2006) Soon enough, after the “World Wide Web” was established, “MSN Hotmail” was created. This changed the entire face of emailing. It was free and was easy to use, compared to the primitive way of emailing. “Hotmail, founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith in 1995, was commercially launched on July 4, 1996, Independence Day in the United States, symbolically representing freedom from ISPs. Jack Smith first had the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world, originally in order to get by corporate firewalls blocking regular mail services. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in "-mail" and finally settled on Hotmail because it included the letters "HTML" - the markup language used to write the base of web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing, which is still styled in that format within part of the URL of the user's email inbox when signed in.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail, 2007) Hotmail has since been bought over by Microsoft has been thriving ever since.

Emailing has literally, shortened the distance within two people communicating, or even communicating with many at any one time. Information or personal messages can be passed through email, and received be the recipient/s almost immediately. Messaging or the exchange of information would have taken days or months before, if the recipient/s were far away, now taken no less than a few seconds. Now, as long as your recipient/s has a personal computer with access to the “World Wide Web”, time is no more a problem. Email has virtually wiped out distance and time forever.