On 05/19/2016 04:01 PM, Rich Alderson wrote: > What he did invent was a mechanism by means of which electronic mail > programs running on networked computers could communicate with each > other. In particular, he decided to use a character with a low > frequency of occurrence in text as the indicator that an address in > the form of a user identifier of some kind resided on a computer > other than the local host. His choice was, of course, the > commercial-at (or commercial-a) character.
As opposed to,say, the "bang" format address (UUCP/usenet) or the double-colon (DECnet) or CSNET (percent sign)--and there were probably a host of company-internal varieties, particularly on older 6-bit machines without a commercial "at" in their character set. Fun was when email was shuttled through a couple of different systems... --Chuck