I never would have guessed how many computers it took to do a simple email. Simple minded as I am I always just assumed 2 or 3. 1 to send 1 to recieve and maybe one to host the process. But 70? Good night moon. I don't exactly understand why the information needs to be sent all around the world however. It seems as if it would be simpler to just have different routers or servers that would be set up in then country of origin to make the process simpler and cut out 60 or so computers. Maybe I'm just not thinking big enough.
I also was pretty surprised to see that all of the information gets cut up and sent out then comes back to a computer which pieces it together. It makes sense that the information would need to be cut down in size to be sent out but it also seems to leave alot of room for error if the information doesn't come in completely. It's like the new bit torrent stuff where little bits of information are sent to the computer all at one time from many different users and pieced together. If every bit isn't there the file is corrupt. I wonder why that doesn't happen more often with emails, what with all the different computers sending the info.