In late 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an MIT engineer working at BBN, decided to concoct a cool hack that would allow such messages to be sent to folders on other mainframes. He did it by combining SNDMSG with an experimental file transfer program called CPYNET, which could exchange files between distant computers on the ARPANET. Then he came up with something that was even more ingenious: in order to instruct a message to go to the file folder of a user at a different site, he used the @ sign on his keyboard to create the addressing system that we all use now, username@hostname. Thus Tomlinson created
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