The Internet is Middle-aged - explains a lot.

From the first email to the first YouTube video: a definitive internet history. What links a broken laser pointer, a coffee pot and the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo? In late 1971 Ray Tomlinson, an engineer working on a time-sharing system called Tenex, combined two programs named Cpynet and SNDMSG in order to send the first ever network email. It had been possible to send email from one user to another on a single computer for nearly 10 years but Tomlinson was the first to use the primitive Arpanet to send text from one computer to another.

While the same principles are used to send emails across the world today, the very first email (the contents of which Tomlinson says he has long forgotten) was sent between two computers sitting right next to each other. At the same time, Tomlinson also devised the format of modern emails, with the @ symbol dividing the user name from the name of the host computer (although he did not invent the symbol itsel). And why did he do it? "Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea."

Full article at http://ping.fm/tVRil