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Raymond Tomlinson is a computer programmer who is credited with creating email. In 1971, Tomlinson took an existing system for local email, known as SNDMSG, and added a file transfer program called CPYNET, so that messages could be sent over a network. Tomlinson’s work was done for the ARPANET project, and email quickly became the dominant activity over the network.
Techopedia Explains Raymond Tomlinson
Email was the first "killer app" for the early Internet, accounting for a majority of the packets being sent back and forth on ARPANET. Tomlinson was, of course, the first person to send email across a network. The computers he used were side by side and the message was a random string of characters that he quickly forgot. Tomlinson is also credited with choosing the "@" sign to separate an individual email from the host. It was such an elegant solution that it persists to this day.
