Answer: From top to bottom, the stills are from the movies "Electronic Love Letters", "Source Code", "Invisible Man", and "Intern". In "E-Love Letters", the male and female protagonists meet and fall in love by e-mail. After entering parallel time and space for the last time, the male protagonist of "Source Code" sends an email to the female officer Goodwin, telling her that the source code can create a guess of parallel worlds. In "The Invisible Man", the heroine's super-controlling boyfriend uses her mailbox to send abusive emails to her relatives and friends, leaving her isolated. In "The Intern", the heroine played by Anne Hathaway mistakenly sent an email with dirty words to her mother, and the intern played by Robert De Niro broke into her mother's house with other colleagues and successfully deleted the email.
When we use @ to circle friends and family on various social platforms, there is a personal contribution that is indispensable. Although the @ symbol has existed for a long time, the first time it was used for the Internet, it was related to Ray Tomlinson.
He implemented the first e-mail system in 1971 and sent the first e-mail. This system was the first to be able to send mail between different host users. Previously, messages could only be sent to other users who used the same computer. To achieve this, he separated the username from the computer name with the @ symbol, a scheme that is still used today in email addresses.
Email used to be the primary tool for people to communicate on the Internet, so there were so many movies to portray it. Nowadays, we have simpler chat apps, people can easily video chat, and email is gradually becoming a tool that is mainly used in business. But the use of @ has been carried forward, and through each @, we can connect with the whole world.
Beijing News editor Wu Longzhen
Proofread by Wu Xingfa
Source: Beijing News