Techy Drift

Image by Muhammad Ribkhan from Pixabay E-mail In 1969 a company called Bolt Barenek and Newman won the contract to develop a communication network called ARPANET that would enable scientists and researchers to use each other's computer facilities. During it's development, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson(b. 1941) started to experiment with coding of two programs. SNDMSG allowed members of the same network to exchange messages among one another, whereas CPYNET allowed file transfers to occur between two separate networks. It occurred to Tomlinson that combining the two he would create a system that would make message transfer possible between different users of independent networks.             One of the most significant decisions made by Tomlinson was his choice of the symbol to separate the user's name from the host network name. It was a fairly logical choice, but one that revived the rather esoteric symbol and saved it from the brink of linguistic extinction.          U