Unit 5. Net Changes Life.

Part 1. Warming up.

A. Keywords. email message, addresses, Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ (the second), Jimmy Carter, email accounts, hoax.

Vocabulary. crash, coordinate, account, hoax, Maine.

You are going to hear some important dates in email history.

Supply the missing dates and words.

Great Days in Email History.

October 1969: Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA computer science professor, sends the first email message to a colleague at Standford.

The computer promptly crashes.

March 1972: Ray Tomlinson, author of the first email software, chooses the "@" sign for addresses.

"I got there first, So I got to choose any punctuation I wanted."

February 1976: Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ (the second) becomes the first head of state to send an email message.

Fall 1976: Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale use email everyday during their campaign to coordinate their travel schedules.

A single message cost 4 $ (U.S dollar) to send.

September 1983: Colby College in Waterville, Maine, becomes one of the first institutions of higher education to assign email accounts to all the students.

December 1994: A widely circulated email hoax appears, warning that reading an email entitled "Good times" will erase your hard drive and destroy your processor.

December 1998: In the movie "you've got an email", a celebration of email romance, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks recreate The Shop Around the Corner online.

The original movie, The Shop Around the Corner, was shown in 1937.

B. Keywords. information superhighway, shorthand, abbreviations.

Vocabulary. techie, zoom, decode, standby, make the rounds.

Listen to a short talk about the abbreviations used on the Internet.

What do these abbreviations mean?

Write down the full meaning.

One feature of the information superhighway is that the traffic travels fast.

And techies used in their own special shorthand to keep messages zooming along.

Today, we'll help you decode tech talk by answering some not so frequently asked questions about the abbreviations on the Internet.

What does it mean when a message includes the letters "AISI" or "IMHO"?

"AISI" stands for "as I see it", and "IMHO" is shorthand for "in my humble opinion".

Some modest folks will also add "FWIW" before sharing their opinion, which stands for "for what it's worth".

Others express their disapproval with the letters "CMIIW", that is "correct me if I'm wrong".

The list of commonly abbreviated phrases on the net is nearly endless.

As a matter of fact, "AAMOF" stands for "as a matter of fact" and "believe or not" gets posted as "BION".

Are there any pre-information-age abbreviations still making the rounds in this high-tech era?

You bet.

The old standbys "FYI", "MYOB" and "SOP", which stand for "for you information", "mind your own business", and "standard operating procedure" are still frequently used today, even in email.

Since time is getting short, has the net given us truly short and clear ways to say goodbye.

Try "TAFN", "that's all for now", and "BCNU", "be seein' you".

C. Keywords. Tim Berners-Lee, World Wide Web.

Vocabulary. primitive.

You are going to hear some statements.

Each statement will be followed an wh-word.

Write down the relevant segments according to the wh-word.

For example, if you hear "The boy was looking for his mother","whom?", just write down the words "his mother".

Tim Berners-Lee is the man who wrote the software program that led to the foundation of the World Wide Web. Who?

In the 1980's, scientists were already communicating using a primitive version of email. When?

In 1990, Tim Beners-Lee wrote programs which form the basis of the World Wide Web. When?

In 1991, his programs were placed on to the Internet. Where?

Between 1991 and 1994, the number of web pages rose from ten (10) to one hundred thousand (100,000). How many?

Right now, the world is focused on e-commerce. What?

The invention of the web brings rapid rewards to people with imagination and new ideas. To whom?