The First Email Was Sent in 1971 — and the 'E' Just Stands for 'Electronic'

A Message That Changed Communication

In late 1971, a programmer named Ray Tomlinson sent a message from one computer to another using the ARPANET — the precursor to the internet — via a new system he had developed for electronic message transmission. He sent the message from one terminal to another in the same room, through the network rather than directly, as a proof of concept. The message itself, by his own account, was probably something like "QWERTYUIOP" — the top row of the keyboard, typed as a test.

Tomlinson did not recognize the moment as historically significant. "I'm famous for something I didn't know was a big deal," he said in interviews years later. Yet the system he implemented that day — electronic messages sent between users on different computers across a network, addressed with a format that remains essentially unchanged today — is the foundation of one of the most widely used communication technologies in human history.

The @ Symbol's Second Life

Tomlinson's most visible contribution was not the message itself but the address format he devised. To distinguish a message intended for a remote computer from one intended for the local system, he needed a separator between the user's name and the machine's address. He chose the @ symbol — the "at" sign — which appeared on his Model 33 teletype keyboard and was not used in any other programming context that might create ambiguity.

The format he chose — username@hostname — was immediately logical: "user at machine." It has survived every subsequent development in email infrastructure, internet addressing, and network design with essentially no modification. The @ symbol went from being a rarely used commercial abbreviation (meaning "at the price of," as in "10 items @ $2 each") to the universal indicator of electronic addresses.

Today, the @ symbol is so strongly associated with email and social media addresses that its original commercial meaning is largely unknown to younger generations. A typewriter key that typists almost never pressed is now among the most frequently typed characters in modern communication.

What Electronic Mail Made Possible

Before email, text-based messages between people at different locations required physical delivery — postal mail, telegram, or teletype — each with significant time delays and costs. The internal messaging systems that preceded Tomlinson's 1971 innovation worked only between users on the same computer. What Tomlinson's system introduced was network-based electronic messaging: the ability to send text instantly to any user on any connected machine.

Email grew slowly through the 1970s and 1980s as ARPANET expanded and eventually transitioned into the modern internet. By the mid-1990s, as consumer internet access became widespread, email adoption accelerated dramatically. Today, an estimated 347 billion emails are sent daily — a volume that makes Tomlinson's test message to himself, sitting in a room in 1971 and typing gibberish to prove a concept, one of the more consequential experiments in the history of communication.

The "E" in email stands for electronic, which is about as literal and functional as a naming convention gets — appropriate for a technology that was invented by someone who didn't think it was a particularly big deal.