When Was the First Email Sent?

In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), adapted an existing messaging program to send text between two DEC PDP-10 computers connected via ARPANET — the precursor to the internet. He chose the "@" symbol to separate the user name from the host name, a convention still used universally today. Tomlinson later recalled that the first test message was something forgettable like "QWERTYUIOP." By the mid-1970s, email accounted for 75% of all ARPANET traffic, demonstrating that communication — not resource sharing — was the network killer application.