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A: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Ray Tomlinson Selects the @ in Email

3/1971

In March 1971 Ray Tomlinson at Bolt, Beranek and Newman developed email for ARPANET: SNDMSG and READMAIL, choosing the “@” sign as a key email address component.

According to an infographic on the history of email posted at http://8.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/email.png in June 2011, Tomlinson no longer remembered the content of the original message.

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