Term Paper on "Evolution of Email and Internet Computer"

Term Paper 12 pages (4193 words) Sources: 1+

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Evolution of Email and Internet

Computer and digital technologies had changed the life of millions in some two decades as they were massively introduced into different spheres of man's activity. First being used only for military purposes in easing difficult and complicated calculation, later on being modernized and advanced their application is seen everywhere where the work relates to data-processing, storing and analyzing. No wonder that once computers were invented scientists started to think over building a network of them in order to have a desired access to the information which is stored on different machines, remote from each other. This resulted in development of the computer networking principles, which were modified and turned into global computer network or Internet.

Internet unites millions and millions computers world wide, building an entire virtual community, virtual information database, virtual communication space and in fact an example of virtual reality, where electric impulses amplified by digital hardware are transformed into visual signals which can be easily understood and perceived by human on the desktops of their PCs.

Internet had developed on the hand with software that made more comfortable, quick and easy to use its features, which basically look like machine codes, and sets of digits or combinations of zeros and ones.

There is quite difficult to find a person in the modern industrialized world, in the world that experienced globalization, informatization and penetration of high technologies in different sphere's of human life, a person who would have never used internet or PC and moreover it would be hard to find one who had never heard of internet. To have a clearer view on internet and on the principles set to its functioning, it's important to look on its history, evolution of computer hardware, software and evolution and variety of different software applications used for work and communication via internet.

History

The idea to build a computer network was not sporadic, was not a commercial project or a scientific experiment. This project was influenced by the realities of cold war of the U.S.A. And the U.S.S.R., arms race and technology race.

The success of the Soviet's in science technology and space in late 1950 ies, especially after the launch of Sputnik satellite in 1957 made the U.S. government to raise defense budget and make impressive investment program to develop national science, technology and especially high technologies. From this point, the unity of informational technology was of the main importance as well as its secure and reliable work.

In 1962 ARPA (advanced research project agency) introduced a new computer technology program to realize the idea of "galactic network," an utopian idea to unite all computers into the network for free access. Utopian in sixties this idea became reality in nineties. By the year of 1967 scientists had determined with the principles of future global network, the result was the design of future ARPANET. It had to include a protocol, which would allow computes to inable data exchange, and it was called interface message processor (IMP). Only ten years later ARPANET became public. First it linked just 40 computers from different locations, which was growing for corporative use:

In 1972, they successfully employed a new program to allow the sending of messages over the net, allowing direct person-to-person communication that we now refer to as e-mail. This development we will deal with at length in the next section

Also in the early 70s, scientists developed host-to-host protocols. Before then the system only allowed a 'remote terminal' to access the files of each separate host. The new protocols allowed access to the hosts's programs (effectively merging the two host computers into one, for the duration of the link).

In 1974, ARPA scientists, working closely with experts in Stanford, developed a common language that would allow different networks to communicate with each other. This was known as a transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP)." (Richard T. Griffiths From ARPANET to World Wide Web, Article Leiden University 2000)

The invention of TCP/IP directed a fundamental change in the development of networking technology, it set the main principles that are used in modern network technology, and what is more important it made network be universal for different computers, private and corporative, public and personal. This concept boosted the growth and construction of networks countrywide: more and more private networks or university networks were uniting into a global one.

Next years were characterized by improvement of technological side of computer networking concept and by the of 1984 Domain Name servers (DNS) were introduced in order to ease the process of data exchange: new system introduced new approach to the classification of network members as some tierings were incorporated in the name of the host (.com for community,.edu for educational,.gov for government computer units). These years were characterized as well by government interest in development of information technologies and bui9lding networks on the principle of TCP/IP mandatory use, which made those networks universal and accessible in future. The principle of functioning of modern www.wasintroduced by Tim Berners in 1989 together with the program for editing and browsering information from network members. Later it was transformed into HTML or hypertext markup language and graphic interface software for implementation. In early nineties when the spread of computers and access to www.grewthere were introduced series of web browsers which easily won the customer's market and remain the most popular for emailing, viewing, receiving and sending data functions.

Services / Programs

Internet allows a lot of interactive functions for computers based on data exchange: sending electronic messages, telecommunication by means of special software which transforms voice signals into digital electric impulses, functions of receiving and viewing data in the form of files and web-pages.

The principles of emailing were designed by engineer Ray Tomlinson in 1971, who developed the concept of using @ symbol in order to identify the receiver of the electronic mail. According to his principles which laid into the modern concept of emailing, email was a simple text message, even attached files looked like simple text.

In order to receive electronic mail there were developed special sorts of software: e-mail clients. The most popular are: Outlook, Eudora, Pegasus and others, besides those special software programs there exist free email clients inscribed into the web-pages: hotmail, yahoo, aol, and others. All of them still have pretty much same functions:

Electronic mailbox shows the headers of messages, data received, size of the message and its status (read or unread)

It allows selecting message and reading it

It allows to compose new messages and send them to their recipients, as well as to add attachments to the messages.

Email client connects to the e-mail server, which execute the function of sending data using primary scheme of "from... to..." like the real mail service. In reality e-mail system's principle in many ways is pretty much the same. Most of e-mail systems consist of two servers that run on one server machine: SMTP server or a Simple Mail Trasfer protocol (for out going email) and POP3 (POST OFFICE PROTOCOL) or IMAP (Internet Mail Access Protocol) for incoming mail.

When a person sets an account on a web-server name.com, the email client is told mail server's name as following: mail.name.com So when a person needs to send a composed message the following functions are executed:

Email-client program connects to the SMPT server at mail.name.com by using port 25.

Email client "tells" the server the whole text body of the message and the address of the recipient, so that SMPT server delivers it to the address by following steps:

It identifies recipient's name and domain name; it makes data exchange with DNS for getting IP address of the SMPT server of the recipient, then it connects to the SMPT server of the recipient using port 25. Recipient's SMPT server redirects it to the server of recipient, which later directs to POP3 server of recipient, which delivers it to user's mailbox.

When the recipient checks his mailbox, his email client program tries to connect to the POP3 sever using port 110. POP3 server asks for the email account name and account password, in order to make identification, after this process is over POP3 allows access the received files by sending them to the user's machine. User can delete received files from the server by using these functions in the email-client program.

In order to access email box from different machines IMAP, more advanced protocol is used. POP3 has disadvantages as downloaded email remains on the machine it was downloaded to.

IMAP allows to organize messages into folders, and checking mail process will take place just on server machine, that's why it allows any user to access his email from different machine, not just his PC. Email-client when connecting to IMAP server uses port143. Then the email-client executes a set of text commands that allow managing the text files received on the server.

Attachments are different kinds of files that are added to email messages. But since the email client may only… READ MORE

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