What was the first email ever sent?
The inventor can't remember what it said - because it was just a test.
The answer
In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a programmer working on ARPANET, sent the first network email between two computers sitting side by side in his lab at BBN Technologies in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He chose the '@' symbol to separate user names from computer names - a convention that endures to this day. When asked what the first email said, Tomlinson admitted it was something forgettable like 'QWERTYUIOP' - a test message he didn't think was historically significant at the time.
Source: Guinness World Records
- internet
- communication
- history
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