E-mail inventor: I didn’t foresee spam
Ray Tomlinson, the creator of email, or the “Send Message Program” as it was originally named, laments the rise of spam in what is an otherwise fascinating article on the history of email.
One problem he had with the first e-mail program was finding a way to separate the person to whom one was addressing a message from the computer or network they were using - which he solved with the symbol @. It could just as easily have been a square bracket or even a comma that would come to be typed in every e-mail address, “but they were already being used, and of the characters that were left, @ was best. Plus it conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit.”
