The man who invented e-mail

Ray Tomilson is the man who invented e-mail. Back in 1971 he was working in a team of programmers who were working on a program called SNDMSG (‘send a message’) that allowed users of the same computer to leave messages for one another – a sort of single-computer version of an e-mail system. They were working on the ARPANET, which was set up by the US Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency to connect different research computers, and which later developed into the internet.

Ray wanted to distinguish between messages that were headed out onto the network and those that were addressed to users in the same office. He studied the keyboard for a symbol that didn’t occur naturally in people’s names and that wasn’t a digit. He chose @ symbol to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other distant host rather than being local – and @ symbol is the only preposition on the keyboard. Before this, the purpose of the @ sign (in English) was to indicate a unit price (for example, 10 items @ $1.95). At the time Ray says he gave it only ’30 to 40 seconds of thought’.

To test the program he sent a message to another computer. The message was something quite forgettable, and he has now forgotten what it was. Electronic mail is now known as e-mail or email. Domain names (apple.com, cambridge.org, etc.) were not used until 1984. Before that each host was only known by its IP (Internet protocol) address number.

Ray’s ideas changed the world and made a lot of others rich, but not him. ‘Innovations is sometimes rewarded’, he says modestly, ‘but not this innovation!’

(Module I. Student’s Book)

B) Find synonyms from the text to the following explanations.

to differentiate; the first part of a website’s address, which usually begins with ‘www.’ and ends with ‘com’, ‘.org’, ’uk’, or other letters that show which country the website is from.

C) True or False?

1. The symbol @ meant the only preposition on the keyboard before Ray started to use it.

2. It took Ray too much time to decide to use @.

3. He has forgotten his first message.

4. Ray’s idea made him very rich.

Ex. 6. Read the text and try to give the explanation of the following words from the text: spam, spambot, to distort, to apart.

Louis von Ahn

E-mail users hate “spam”, and the people who send spam hate Louis fon Ahn. They use programs called spambots to steel e-mail addresses. To stop them, von Ahn developed a visual test involves recognising distorted words, letters and numbers. Humans can pass the CAPTCHA, or “Completely Automated Public Turning Test to Tell Computers and Human Apart”, but spambots cannot. Some 60 million CAPTCHAs are decoded by people every day. Then von Ahn started thinking about using the method to digitize books. Pages are scanned into computers that convert images into text. But computers cannot recognize distorted letters. That’s where humans can help, says von Ahn. The solution is to send unclear texts in the form of CAPATCHAs for people to decode. Born in Guatemala City, 30-year-old von Ahn teaches computer science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburg, Pensylvania.

(Module I. Student’s Book)

 

SPEAKING

Ex. 7. Work in pairs.Discuss with your partner the questions:

 

1. What scientific achievement, discovery or invention plays an important part in our/your life.

2. Why?

3. How often do you use it in your everyday life?

Unit 2. Women in science

READING

 

Ex. 1. Read the names of the different women and say what they are famous for, matching the names on the left with the professions on the right:

Julia Roberts                         - a scientist

Jane Austen                           - a mathematician

Marie Curie                           - a founder of the nursing profession

Sofia Kovalevskaya              - a cosmonaut

Florence Nightingale                       - a writer

Jane Fonda                            - a singer

Valentina Tereshkova           - a politician

Margaret Thatcher                - a film star

Kylie Minogue                       - the creator if aerobics

 

Ex. 2. A) Read the text and do the tasks below.

Marie Curie.

 

Dr. Marie Curie is known to the world as the scientist who discovered radioactive metals i.e. Radium & Polonium.

Marie Curie was a Polish physicist and chemist who lived between 1867-1934. Together with her husband, Pierre, she discovered two new elements (radium and polonium, two radioactive elements that they extracted chemically from pitchblended ore) and studied the x-rays they emitted. She found that the harmful properties of x-rays were able to kill tumors. By the end of World War I, Marie Curie was probably the most famous woman in the world. She had made a conscious decision, however, not to patent methods of processing radium or its medical applications.

Marie Curie was born on November 7, 1867 in Poland and died on July 4, 1934. Her co-discovery with her husband Pierre Curie of the radioactive elements radium and polonium represents one of the best known stories in modern science for which they were recognized in 1901 with the Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1911, Marie Curie was honored with a second Nobel prize, this time in chemistry, to honor her for successfully isolating pure radium and determining radium's atomic weight.

As a child, Marie Curie amazed people with her great memory. She learned to read when she was only four years old. Her father was a professor of science and the instruments that he kept in a glass case fascinated Marie. She dreamed of becoming a scientist, but that would not be easy. Her family became very poor, and at the age of 18, Marie became a governess. She helped pay for her sister to study in Paris. Later, her sister helped Marie with her education. In 1891, Marie attended the Sorbonne University in Paris where she met and married Pierre Curie, a well-known physicist.

After the sudden accidental death of Pierre Curie, Marie Curie managed to raise her two small daughters (Irène, who was herself awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, and Eve who became an accomplished author) and continue an active career in experimental radioactivity measurements.

Marie Curie contributed greatly to our understanding of radioactivity and the effects of x-rays. She received two Nobel prizes for her brilliant work, but died of leukemia, caused by her repeated exposure to radioactive material.

(Module I. Student’s Book)

B) Give possible synonyms or definitions to the following words or find their meaning in the dictionary: to extract, tumor, application, accomplished.

C) Answer the questions:

1. What new facts and information have you learnt from the text?

2. Which information mostly surprised you? Why?

 

LISTENING

Ex. 3. A) Before listening try to guess the meaning of the following words: to drip, backer, to commit.

B) Listen to the interview with Mandy Haberman, inventor of a non-spill cup for children and after listening try to explain the following expressions:

made a series of prototypes, look for a financial backer, applied for a patent,

exhibited at trade shows, set up my own company.

PRESENTATION

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