Tomlinson was one of agroup of scientists who were working on developing better computers.
The scientists at his site were able to send a message to a "mailbox" on the computer on their
site. Other scientists could view the messages in the mailbox . But there were other computers at
other siter where scientists were working on the same project. Tomlinson's idea was to figure out
a way to deliver messages to mailboxes on those remote computers. He used the @ sign to identify
messages that were headed out of the local machine to the more distant ones. That was the start of
the emailing systems that we still use today.
At first, the number of people on email, but by the end of the 20th century, there were 263 million
email boxes. In the 21st century, that figure has grown to over 2 billion, and the functions of
email services in the future will become more and more diversified. And text messaging on cell
phones is also increasing, so people can, in effect, be in constant touch with people who are long
distances away.