There is Samuel B. Morse and the first telegram. Delivered on May 24, 1844, the message read "What hath god wrought!" Morse knew that he was making history.
And there was the dawn of the telephone era, heralded by Alexander Graham Bell's less grand, though still legendary, summons to his assistant on March 10, 1876: "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you."
While the exact wording of Guglielmo Marconi's first wireless transmission in 1895 is not the stuff of legend, it didn't take long for Marconi to be heaped with honors and awards, topped off by a Nobel Prize for physics in 1909. And even 30 years later the inauguration of wireless service between England and South Africa felt like an historic event to the participants. "We speak across time and space. . . . May the new power promote peace between all nations," read the Marconigram sent from Sir Edgar Walton, high commissioner of South Africa, to General J. B. M. Hertzog, South Africa's prime minister, in 1924.
Sometime in late 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message. "I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other," he recalls now. "The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar."
It seems doubtful that "QWERTYIOP" will make it into the history books. And Tomlinson's name hardly lives in the public mind. When he is remembered at all, it is as the man who picked @ as the locator symbol in electronic addresses. In truth though, he is the inventor of e-mail, the application that launched the digital information revolution. And yet the breakthrough he made was such a simple evolutionary step that hardly anyone noticed it till later. At the time, it barely registered with Ray Tomlinson.
...taken from www.pretext.com
Click to find out more...
Home
History
Uses
Impact
Talking Headers: More on this Topic
