The man who created the @ symbol—and changed how people communicate to each other

Thekabarnews.com – In 1971, a teenage engineer scribbled a message that no one recalls in a quiet basement lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He did not know it at the time, but that little thing would change the way more than five billion people talk to each other every day.

Ray Tomlinson was working late at BBN Technologies, a company that helped construct ARPANET, the experimental network that would ultimately become the internet. Back then, computers could already save messages, but only for users who used the same system. Tomlinson thought the limit did not make much sense.

He reasoned, “If computers were supposed to connect, why could not communications go between them?” He began to try things out.

Tomlinson built a basic application that let text transfer from one computer to another via the network. But there was still a basic problem: how could the system tell who the message was for?

He looked at his keyboard and saw a symbol that nearly no one else used. He spotted the “@” symbol.

Tomlinson utilized it to separate a person’s name from the machine that hosted them in a matter of seconds: username @ computername.

That small decision turned out to be the most important part of digital communication around the world.

Tomlinson typed the first email, which was probably just a series of letters like “QWERTYUIOP,” and sent it to himself. There was no event. No news. He did not even keep the message. It worked, and he went on.

Within weeks, other BBN engineers were utilizing the system every day. Email took over ARPANET in just a few months. By the 1980s, it had extended to colleges and institutions. It had spread all across the world by the 1990s.

Every day, around 330 billion emails are sent

Ray Tomlinson never got a patent on email. He never registered the “@” symbol as a trademark. He never started a business based on it, never sought popularity, and never became a tech star. It was only a way for him to solve a clear problem.

In 2016, Gmail paid tribute to Ray Tomlinson’s death with a simple message: “Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for creating email and bringing @ to the world.”

Most of the individuals who read that tweet did not know who he was, but every email ever sent, from love letters sent across countries to job applications to school notices to password resets, carries on his quiet legacy.

There were no big speeches. He did not receive any venture capital. No branding is worth a billion dollars. One engineer, one sign that was missed, and a message that he could not remember. Ray Tomlinson did not change the world by yelling; he changed it by typing.