What do you think of this fact?
You probably type it every day without thinking: the @ in every email address. It’s there thanks to an engineer named Ray Tomlinson. In 1971, he sent the first email from one computer to another.
Messages existed, just not across a network
Tomlinson worked at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, or BBN, in the Boston area. Its computers were hooked up to the ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. Back then, you could already leave messages for other users on the same computer, for example with a program called SNDMSG.
Tomlinson had a better idea. He combined SNDMSG with code from CPYNET, a program for transferring files. For the first time, messages could travel between different computers on a network.
The first test was pretty unspectacular. The two PDP-10 computers sat side by side in his office, only about 10 feet apart according to NPR. Nobody remembers what the very first email said, not even Tomlinson. Maybe something like “QWERTYUIOP.” He later put it this way: the first email was completely forgettable, and therefore forgotten.
Why the @, of all things
For a message to find its target, it needs two pieces of info: who gets it and on which machine. Tomlinson needed a symbol to separate the two. The @ was perfect because it never showed up in usernames and barely had any other job. Plus, it just makes sense: user at host. Tomlinson called it “the only preposition on the keyboard.”
In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York added the @ to its architecture and design collection.
Tomlinson died in 2016 at age 74. He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame and still called himself a “Luddite.” The guy behind email wasn’t much of a gadget person. Respect.