@ — or how Raymond Tomlinson wrote the future of email

Raymond Tomlinson
It is debatable whether there would’ve been email without Raymond Tomlinson, but it’s certain that @ would not have been such an important part of our lives and popular culture if he hadn’t been around.
The first known electronic message service was the AUTODIN network that became operational in 1962, linking 1,350 terminals and handling 30 million messages of around 3,000-character length every month. Tomlinson came into the picture in 1971, when his company