Nobody tried to invent the e-mail. It simply happened. In 1969 an American, Ray Tomlinson, was working on two projects at the same time.Firstly, he was working on a programme called SNDMSG ( send message).With that programme the people in his company were able to leave messages for each other. The second project was a file-transfer programme (CYPNET). With that programme users were able to send files between linked computers.
Suddenly Tomlinson had an idea.«If I put the two programmes together, I may be able to send messages, not just files, to other computers.»The idea worked and quickly became popular.
Tomlinson invented e-mail addresses too. These have two parts:the name of the user and the name of the host (the computer) .He chose the "commercial at" symbol and combined the user and host names. For example:
[email protected] (миша инин на компьютере лукинск.ру) .the decision to take the @ symbol took Tomlinson only thiry or forty seconds.