Of course, Al Gore never claimed to invent the Internet in the first place.
 He was instrumental in getting the legislation to create the Internet (as
opposed do ARPPANET, et al) moved forward and his claim to have helped
create the Internet is more than a bit self serving but really not that far
off the mark.
It's not actually the "@" that signals the mail to be sent from A to B.  The
@ is a delimiter between your Id (eg tamarmag51) at place A and the domain
name of place A (eg yahoo.com).  The protocol (SMTP if you want to Google on
it) for moving mail looks up the address of place B by looking at the domain
name and simply forwards your mail to that place.  At that point the SMTP
agent at place B looks up all the ids attached to it's domain name and sees
if it knows of anyone with the same Ids.

Early in my career I was mainly worked on the network software side of the
house and I actually got to write one of the first mail handlers and address
parsers for moving mail between domains way back in the days before the
Internet officially existed.  As a result I was probably one of the first 20
people or so to ever send an email between Canada and the USA. X.25, SDLC,
HDLC, async, bisync (in all their flavors),  cards, teletype, good grief,
all part of my ancient past....

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 3:54 PM, Tamar Raine <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Yeah, methinks mr. gore was kidding when he claimeth to invent the
> internet! harumph! the chutzpah!
>
> Myself, I still can't quite grasp how the @ signals mail to be sent from A
> to B!  but I am glad it does.
>
> When I discovered chat, it opened a window to the world... For the first
> time in my life, I could bring my witty, flirtatious self to the proverbial
> party and be a "Belle"  and not worry whether people understood me or not.
> They could get to know me first.
>
> maybe with some motivation, Harleen's sister could learn to type, there are
> many ways to type. head-pointers, eye-gaze systems, large keyboards. Your
> family should take your sister to a communications evaluator where they will
> try many different kinds.
>
> The world is a very, very frustrating place for those of us with speech
> impairments.
>
> Mag
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> http://www.zazzle.com/TamarMag*
> Tamar Mag Raine
> [log in to unmask]
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: "Cleveland, Kyle E." <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 12:03:12 PM
> Subject: Re: Come Together
>
> Cool!  Deri remembers packet switching and X.25!  Do you remember the
> good-old-days of bisync and polled terminals?  Ah...good times.  Good
> times.
>
> --
Peter Hunsberger

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