Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2001/10/08
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> Brian....is it true that you are responsible for
> the "@" symbol in Internet email addresses?
It's fuzzy and complicated. The choice of the "@" sign was made by
several people at about the same time. I generally credit Charlotte
Mooers with being the first. She generally credits John Vittal, as does
John. I probably got the idea from Phil Karlton, who was killed in a car
crash in Italy a few years ago without ever revealing who he would
credit.
Until the middle 1970s it was customary to write email addresses as
mooers at bbn
rather than
mooers@bbn
or (much later)
mooers@bbn.arpa
then even later
mooers@bbn.com
I was certainly pretty forceful in my push to get "@" used in place of
"space-at-space", but I don't think it's fair to say that I invented it
or selected it. I will absolutely take credit for having provided
rational justification for it (it could be typed on every keyboard of
that era without using the SHIFT key, and it had no other meaning at the
time). Other people who contributed to this include Austin Henderson,
Ken Pogran, Ed Taft, Diana Bajzek, Martin Frost, and probably many
others that I don't remember.
Here is a copy-and-paste quotation from the first written standard for
email:
We suggest that the text of network mail, whether transmitted
over the FTP telnet connection (via the MAIL command) or over a
separate data connection (with the MLFL command), be governed by
the syntax below:
Example:
From: White at SRI-ARC
Date: 24 JUL 1973 1527-PDT
Subject: Multi-Site Journal Meeting Announcement
NIC: 17996
At 10 AM Wednesday 25-JULY there will be a meeting
to discuss a Multi-Site Journal in the context of
the Utility. Y'all be here.
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