Which symbol was chosen by Ray Tomlinson to separate the user name from the host name in an email address?
- A.#
- B.&
- C.@
- D.*
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is C, the @ sign. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers on ARPANET in 1971 and needed a character that would never appear in a person's name. He picked @, which already meant at in trade bills, so that an address could be read as a user at a place. Every email address since then has the form user@domain.
Option A, the hash, is used to mark tags on social sites and as a comment sign in some programs, never as the divider in a mail address. Option B, the ampersand, means and and is used in program names and file paths. Option D, the asterisk, works as a wild card in searches and as the multiplication sign in spreadsheets and programming. Only @ separates the two halves of an email address.
Read the full article: Internet and Email: Protocols, Ports and Terms
Practice Questions
View allDeleted emails are stored in
- A.Drafts
- B.Trash
- C.Inbox
- D.Sent mail
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When a letter is deleted from a mailbox it is not wiped out at once. It is moved to a folder called Trash, or Bin in some services, and kept there for a fixed number of days so that a letter deleted by mistake can be restored.
Read the full explanation →In Gmail, the email address of the recipients can be entered in __________ field.
- A.Subject
- B.To
- C.Message
- D.From
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The To field of a mail window is meant for the addresses of the people the letter is written to.
Read the full explanation →ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet, carried its first message in which year?
- A.1959
- B.1969
- C.1979
- D.1989
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ARPANET was funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense, and in 1969 it linked computers at four American universities and passed its first message between them.
Read the full explanation →Who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web?
- A.Vinton Cerf
- B.Charles Babbage
- C.Tim Berners-Lee
- D.Ray Tomlinson
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Working at CERN in Switzerland, he proposed a system of linked documents in 1989, wrote the first browser and server, and put the first website online in 1991.
Read the full explanation →What is the default port number of HTTPS?
- A.21
- B.80
- C.110
- D.443
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HTTPS is HTTP wrapped in encryption, and web servers listen for it on port 443. When an address begins with https, the browser opens a secure channel on that port, and the padlock shown beside the address means the traffic on it is coded.
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