It seems incredible but @ - email, that is - is already 34 years old!

“It’s difficult to pin down the exact origin of email, but in October 1971, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson chose the ‘@’ symbol for email addresses and wrote software to send the first network email,” writes Google Paul Buchheit on the company blog.

Bucheit isn’t celebrating email, of course. He’s plugging gmail, as it’s known in most places except the UK
Meanwhile, “In late 1971, Tomlinson developed the first ARPANET email application when he updated SNDMSG by adding a program called CPYNET capable of copying files over the network, and informed his colleagues by sending them an email using the new program with instructions on how to use it,” says Dave Crocker on his Email History.

“To extend the addressing to the network, Tomlinson chose the ‘commercial at’ symbol to combine the user and host names, providing the naturally meaningful notation ‘user@host’ that is the standard for email addressing today. These early programs had simple functionality and were command line driven, but established the basic transactional model that still defines the technology - email gets sent to someone else’s mailbox.”
And to cap it off, “In 1993, the large network service providers America Online and Delphi started to connect their proprietary email systems to the Internet, beginning the large scale adoption of Internet email as a global standard,” adds Crocker.

Happy birthday, @ : )
Via p2pnet.net