Look at any email address and you will find the same small character sitting in the middle of it: the @ sign. It is so ordinary that almost nobody asks where it came from or why it is there. Yet that symbol was a deliberate engineering decision made by one person in 1971, and the convention has now survived more than fifty years of relentless change in computing. For anyone who builds connected systems, from a web app to an IoT sensor in Parañaque, the story is a small masterclass in durable design.
The engineer who sent the first networked email
In 1971, an engineer named Ray Tomlinson was working at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), one of the firms building ARPANET, the research network that would eventually grow into the internet. People could already leave messages for each other, but only on the same shared computer. Tomlinson was experimenting with a program that could move a message from one machine to a different machine across the network. When he succeeded, he had effectively sent the first email between two separate computers, which happened to be sitting side by side in his lab and connected through ARPANET.
That achievement created a brand-new problem. If a message was going to travel to another machine, the system needed a way to say not just who the recipient was, but which computer they were on. Tomlinson needed a single, unambiguous way to write "this user, at that host."
Why the @ symbol won
Tomlinson looked down at his Teletype Model 33 keyboard for a character he could borrow. His requirements were strict and practical. The symbol could not be something that already appeared in people's names or in the names of host computers, or the address would be impossible to parse. It also had to be a character the system would not confuse with a command.
The @ sign fit perfectly. It was already on the keyboard, it was rarely used for anything else in computing at the time, and, conveniently, it literally meant "at" in commercial and accounting usage. So user @ host read almost like plain English: this person, at this machine. The format stuck immediately and became the template every email system has used since. A choice made in a single afternoon now routes billions of messages every day.
What this teaches about building connected systems
The lasting lesson is not really about email. It is about the value of simple, unambiguous conventions in systems that have to interoperate. Tomlinson did not invent a complicated new addressing scheme; he picked an existing character that carried no conflicting meaning and gave it one clear job. That clarity is exactly why it scaled.
The same principle runs straight through modern IoT and embedded work. When you design how devices identify themselves on a network, how a firmware update names its target, or how a sensor publishes to an MQTT topic, you are making the same kind of decision Tomlinson made. A naming scheme that is clean, collision-free, and human-readable will quietly keep working as your fleet grows from one prototype to thousands of units. A clever but ambiguous one becomes a tax you pay forever. The best addressing decisions, like the @ sign, are the ones nobody ever has to revisit.
Build on durable foundations
At Fluidwire we build IoT and web systems from silicon to cloud, and that means caring about the unglamorous decisions, such as how devices are addressed, how data is structured, and how firmware talks to the cloud, as much as the features users see. Good plumbing is what lets a product last. If you are turning a connected-device idea or a thesis prototype into something real, take a look at our services or get in touch and we will help you build it on foundations that hold up.
The next time you type an @ into an address bar, remember it is a fifty-year-old engineering shortcut that simply refused to break.
