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Who chose the '@' symbol for email addresses?
He used it to separate the user's name from the computer's name.
Tomlinson was an engineer at BBN, the company that built the ARPANET's routing hardware. In 1971 he adapted a program that let users on one shared computer leave messages for each other so that it could deliver mail between machines on the network. He needed a character to separate the user name from the host name, and he said he was looking for a symbol that was not used much.
The '@' sign was already on the keyboard of his Teletype terminal. Its history is much older: the earliest documented use cited is from 1536, when a Florentine merchant used it as a unit for wine amphorae, and later merchants read it as 'at the rate of', as in '5 @ $2'. By the 1970s it was essentially a rarely used accounting mark, so it caused no clash with commands.
Tomlinson recalled that his first test message was sent between two machines in the same room and that he could not remember its content, so claims that it read 'QWERTYUIOP' are recollection, not record. He did not invent email itself, since same-computer mail systems already existed; his contribution was networked addressing in the user@host form, which remains the basis of email addresses.