The first emailer - Module 6

C1 Advanced · Open Cloze · Advanced Expert Student's Resource Book, Pearson Education

For questions 1–8, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap. There is an example at the beginning.

One evening in 1971, (0) ___ Raymond S Tomlinson was working late in a laboratory in Massachusetts, he witnessed a fridge-sized computer receiving a line of text he had typed into a similarly bulky machine positioned a metre away. He can't remember (1) ___ the message was, nor the exact date on (2) ___ it was sent, but the 29-year-old had just sent the first ever email. Tomlinson designed his programme (3) ___ a tool for users to communicate on Arpanet, the US military network that 20 years later was to evolve (4) ___ the internet. The email address he created for himself, Tomlinson@bbn-tenexa, incorporated his name, the operating system, his location and the 'at' sign, which was recently deemed (5) ___ iconic of the computer age that it was acquired by New York's Museum of Modern Art. (6) ___ to Tomlinson, he chose it because it was the only preposition on the keyboard. What's (7) ___ , email wasn't Tomlinson's only contribution to the history of electronic communication. He went (8) ___ to help develop global positioning systems, supercomputers and video conferencing software.

The first emailer

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