Network email and the @ sign
Correo electrónico en red y la arroba
- Date
- 1971 · confidence high
- Place
- BBN, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
- Credited to
- Ray Tomlinson (BBN); earlier local messaging in MIT's CTSS (1965)
- People
- 👤 Ray Tomlinson1941–2016
- Field
- Communication
What it is
First program to send messages between users on different computers over ARPANET, using the @ sign to separate user and machine. It was the killer app of networks for twenty years.
Shiva Ayyadurai claimed to have invented email in 1978, a claim rejected by historians.
What it led to
- Global asynchronous communication and the culture of the connected office
- Spam, phishing and social engineering
- Instant messaging and social media as successors
Built on
Made possible
- Internet Relay Chat (IRC)1988
- mailing lists
- spam
- SMTP
- Gmail