In 1969 a company called Bolt Barenek and Newman won the contract to develop a communication network called ARPANET that would enable scientists and researchers to use each other's computer facilities. During its development, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson (b. 1941) started to experiment with the coding of two programs. SNDMSG allowed members of the same network to exchange messages among one another, whereas CPYNET allowed file transfers to occur between two separate networks. It occurred to Tomlinson that by combining the two he could create a system that would make message transfer possible between different users of independent networks.
One of the most significant decisions made by Tomlinson was his choice of the @ symbol to separate the user's name from the host network name. It was a fairly logical choice, but one that revived the rather esoteric symbol and saved it from the brink of linguistic extinction.
Unaware of the global significance that the 200 lines of code that made up the e-mail program would have, Tomlinson neglected to note what he wrote in the first e-mail ever sent (he claims it was something banal like "QWERTYUIOP" or "TESTING 1 2 3 4").
Allegedly, when Tomlinson first demonstrated his program to a coworker, the latter told him not to show the system to anyone because it was not part of their job description. Tomlinson has since said that even though there was no direct stated objective to create e-mail, the ARPANET project was in fact a giant and worthwhile investigation into the multifarious uses of computer communication.
