the first email
loreops culturenetworking
Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked electronic mail between two ARPANET machines in 1971, choosing @ to separate user from host.
Tomlinson was adapting his SNDMSG program at BBN when he picked the at sign, an underused character that read naturally as 'user at host'. He later admitted he could not remember the content of the first message, guessing it was something like QWERTYUIOP. The convention he chose in an afternoon still addresses every mailbox on Earth.