Who invented email?

Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email as we know it. He implemented the @ symbol to distinguish the user name from the destination host, creating the addressing system still used worldwide.

He built this while working on ARPANET's communication software. Think of him as the first shipwright of digital correspondence, designing both the vessels and the harbors they would travel between.

Others had created local mail systems before him, but Tomlinson was the first to make a message jump between computers. Years later, Shiva Ayyadurai claimed to have invented email in 1978, but his system was limited to a single local machine and came years after Tomlinson's networked version.