First email

In 1971 Ray Tomlinson sent the first email between two computers on the ARPANET and chose the @ sign to separate user and host.

Context

Ray Tomlinson was an engineer at the research firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Massachusetts. Electronic messages already existed between users of a single shared computer. His step was to adapt a local mail program so a message could be delivered to a user on a different machine connected through the ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet.

He needed a character to separate the person's name from the name of the computer, and he picked the @ sign because it appeared on his keyboard and was unlikely to turn up in a name. The format of user at host is still how email addresses work today.

The date is usually given as 1971, though accounts do not agree on a precise day. Tomlinson later said the test messages were meaningless text and that he did not keep them, so the exact first words are not documented. The two computers were reportedly in the same room, but they were linked by the network, which is why the event counts as the first network email. The program Tomlinson used for the transfer drew on an existing local messaging tool and a file-copying tool for the network, and the combination quickly spread to other ARPANET sites in the following years.