This month marks the 40th anniversary of the first ARPANET email, which was sent by Ray Tomlinson. A remembrance of that leap forward in communications, via The Next Web:

“As Tomlinson told the Times in 2008, he doesn’t remember what that first email actually said – perhaps ‘QWERTY’ or another string of characters, but whatever it was, it traveled a distance of one meter between two separate computers. One small step for a message, one giant leap for mankind.

Besides inventing email, Tomlinson is also the man to thank for the popularity of the ‘@’ symbol. He established the convention of an email ‘address’ in order to identify the recipient and the computer or network that they were using. To separate these two pieces of information, he chose ‘@’. He told The Times,  ‘It conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit.'”