Description

Computer Friendly for Seniors
By Diane Timmons

By way of introduction, this column is for people who just want to understand the personal computer a little more. It will be written on a very basic level. My intended audience is the people who learned to type on typewriters. Of course, now it’s called keyboarding.

Our first topic is email. Where did email come from and how did it get here?

Email appeared in our lives sometime in the late 80s, but the beginning is kind of hazy. For many people, AOL or America Online, provided their first email address (e.g., myname@aol.com). Email caught on because it’s so much faster than stamped mail, sometimes called snail mail.

Email is why many of us go to the computer in the first place. Email was one of the first capabilities of the Internet reaching back to the 70s. But in the 70s, unless you were with the government or a university, you didn’t realize that this powerful capability was even being used. In the 80s, companies like General Electric were offering email to large corporations for in house use. After a while technology developed to the point that different companies could exchange email between themselves. But it wasn’t until the 90s with the wider use of the Internet that people like you and I could exchange email as we know it today to communicate almost instantly with friends and family.

It was the development of Internet browsers (Netscape and Internet Explorer) that allowed us to see the computer screen in a graphical environment. Then someone invented the mouse, which is the device we now use to point and click on screen items. Suddenly the computer had developed into something that wasn’t text based anymore and was getting fairly easy to use. The computer screen showed color and pictures. Pictures of the grandkids! And we wanted some of that.

So let’s talk about the simplest element of email, your email address. Why is it so important to get it just right? Here’s why. Underlying all those graphics on the computer screen is still a machine that only understands machine language, and your email address must be perfect. Your email address is composed of two elements joined by the “at” symbol or @.

So a typical email address looks like this:

     myname@company.com

First of all, the address can be in lower case or all capitals. Case doesn’t matter when it comes to email addresses. The first half of the email address before the @ symbol is unique to you and identifies you to your email provider. No one else can have this combination of letters or numbers within that email provider’s special address (the domain). Some examples of a domain are:

            Yahoo.com

            Excite.com

            Juno.com

I’ll explain domain more in a future column. For now understand that my example “company.com” is unique to that organization or company that is your email provider. The combination of your username and domain tells the Internet how to send that message to your in box, just as your mail carrier needs your street address to deliver to the correct mail box at your house.

Here are a couple more email conventions before we close. There can be no spaces in an email address. If someone says “underscore” when giving you their email address, they are referring to the shift-hyphen key. If they say “dot” they mean the period key.

Now you have a brief history of email and the anatomy of an email address. Next week, we will discuss Email etiquette. Yes, it is possible to be rude via email.

Email dtimmons@dtimmons.com with your questions.