Engineer knew where it was @

The man who invented the “@” e-mail sign.

Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at Cambridge, Mass.-based Bolt Beranek and Newman, came up with the use of @ to help send messages to e-mail recipients.

In 1980 he began figuring out ways to deliver electronic messages to users across different computer networks. He needed a character on the keyboard that did not normally appear in the log-in names of users or in the host name of computers. Not many symbols were left, and he chose the “at” sign because it conveyed a sense of place, said Tomlinson.