You might think email started alongside the web in the 1990s, but it actually existed decades earlier. The first system resembling email appeared in the 1970s on ARPANET, a network that predated the modern internet. Ray Tomlinson, the engineer credited with inventing email, also introduced the “@” symbol for separating usernames from hostnames. By the time the web went public in 1991, email had already been in use for nearly 20 years!
