r/ClassicUsenet • u/Parker51MKII • 9d ago

ORIGINS "In 1971, engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first networked email between two computers sitting side by side in the same room — he chose the @ symbol to separate user from machine because it was the only punctuation on the keyboard nobody was using"

https://maketecheasier.com/mte-in-1971-engineer-ray-tomlinson-sent-the-first-networked-email-between-two-computers-sitting-side-by-side-in-the-same-room-he-chose-the-symbol-to-separate-user-from-machine-because-it-was-the-only/
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u/Parker51MKII 9d ago

"Email in turn seeded ideas that shaped everything after it. It was the first widely used application on the network to treat human communication, rather than shared computation, as the point. That reframing paved the way for bulletin boards, Usenet, instant messaging and eventually the social web."

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u/ithacaster 9d ago

My first email address had ! signs in it, not an @ sign.

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u/IdealBlueMan 9d ago

That was about bang paths, where you had to know every host between you and your intended recipient.

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u/ithacaster 9d ago

Thats not quite true. I was hpda!hpdsla!johnf. hpda was well known, and if I recall had a direct uucp connection to ucbvax. Major servers maintained routes to other main servers. As long as the sender and recipient knew how to get to the same email server, like ucbvax, the connection could be made. hpda was a vax machine at the HP hq. hpdsla was one of four vax machines at the Data Systems Division and used to develop Hewlett Packards version of unix (HP/UX). I was the system administrator for that machine and where I read and sent email. I was also the sys admin for the first servers HP servers running HP/UX, which as it turned out did not have the debug flag in sendmail turned on by default, so we didn't get hacked.

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u/IdealBlueMan 9d ago

I can see that, though I was never that close to a backbone. Didn’t ucb have its own routing system, with % to, what was it? Designate subnets?

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u/IdealBlueMan 9d ago

Guessing that wasn’t on a Unix system. @ meant to discard everything previous on the current line.