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In 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at the American firm BBN, sent the first email between two computers on a network. To separate a person's name from the name of their computer, he put an @ between them, the pattern still used in every email address.

Ray Tomlinson, 1971

TechnologyHistory

The story behind the card

Until then, people could leave messages only for others using the same computer. Tomlinson combined a program for such messages, SNDMSG, with a file-transfer program he had written, CPYNET, so that mail could travel over the ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet. His first test went between two machines standing side by side. He later said the test messages were forgettable, probably a random string of keys such as QWERTYUIOP, the top row of letters. He chose @ because it was already on the keyboard, hardly ever appeared in names and meant ‘at’; in trade it had long meant ‘at the rate of’. Many languages have their own name for it: Italians call it chiocciola (snail), the Dutch apenstaart (monkey's tail), and in Turkish it is kuyruklu a (a with a tail), usually read aloud as ‘et’.

Türkçe oku
ABD'deki BBN şirketinde mühendis olan Ray Tomlinson, 1971'de bir ağ üzerinden iki bilgisayar arasında ilk e-postayı gönderdi. Kişinin adını bilgisayarının adından ayırmak için araya @ işaretini koydu; bugün bütün e-posta adresleri bu düzeni kullanıyor.

O güne kadar insanlar yalnızca aynı bilgisayarı kullanan kişilere mesaj bırakabiliyordu. Tomlinson, bu işe yarayan SNDMSG programını kendi yazdığı CPYNET adlı dosya aktarma programıyla birleştirdi; böylece mesajlar internetin öncüsü ARPANET üzerinden başka bilgisayarlara gidebildi. İlk denemeyi yan yana duran iki bilgisayar arasında yaptı. Sonradan, deneme mesajlarının akılda kalacak bir yanı olmadığını, büyük olasılıkla klavyenin üst sırasındaki QWERTYUIOP gibi rastgele harflerden oluştuğunu söyledi. @ işaretini seçti, çünkü klavyede zaten vardı, adlarda neredeyse hiç geçmiyordu ve İngilizcede “at”, yani “-de, -da” anlamına geliyordu. Ticarette de uzun zamandır “tanesi şu fiyattan” anlamında kullanılıyordu. İşaretin birçok dilde kendine özgü bir adı vardır: İtalyanlar chiocciola (salyangoz), Hollandalılar apenstaart (maymun kuyruğu) der; Türkçede kuyruklu a diye bilinir ve genellikle “et” diye okunur.

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