Pub. 4 2014 Issue 2

11 MINING FOCUS CONTRIBUTION continued on page 12 Mining’s Contribution to Electronics P eople in the U.S. today tend to take electronic equipment such as computers for granted.When you walk into a store that sells electronics, after all, chances are that what you see is going to be sleek, thin, have some impressive numbers associated to tell you how fast and powerful it is, and look nothing like the materials that were mined in order to construct it. Howmuch do we take our modern toys for granted? You probably don’t realize how big a part of your life they have become. When you think about it, however, there aremany Internet “firsts” that would simply have been impossible without computers, tablets, laptops, and smart phones (and the minerals used to manufacture them): • Ray Tomlinson sent, and received, the first email in 1971. The U.S. Department of Defense sponsored and built a large network of computers that it called theARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network). Those who put it together connected the computers first, but didn’t know what to do with them once that was done, so they started looking around for possible applications. A man named Richard W. Watson created a Mail Box Protocol that was never implemented. Ray Tomlinson, who worked at a company called BBN Technologies (now Raytheon BBN Technologies), was aware of a program called SNDMSG that had been around since about 1961. He combined the functionality of SNDMSG and another program, CPYNET; by doing this, he made the first email program. If you are young enough, it’s possible you may never even have known a time when you couldn’t send an email message. • Gary Thuerk, who was working as a marketer for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent the first spam email in 1978. The message was about open houses where people could come see computers. Enough people paid attention to the message to justify sending it, and an entirely new aspect of marketing was born. • The first portable computer, the Osborne 1, was released in 1981. • Symbolics.comwas the first registered domain name in 1985. • The first website dates back to 1991 and had information about the worldwide web.