What Day Was the first network email sent (Ray Tomlinson)?

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Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer working on the ARPANET (the US Defense Department precursor to the modern internet), sent what is widely credited as the first network email between two separate computers, and is credited with choosing the @ symbol to separate the user name from the destination machine.

Tomlinson later said he couldn't remember the exact content of the first test message, since it was purely a technical test rather than a meaningful communication.

Tomlinson has said the choice of the @ symbol was largely because it was one of the few characters on the keyboard unlikely to already appear in a person's name, making it a clean, unambiguous separator.

The ARPANET the message traveled across connected only a small handful of research institutions at the time, a far cry from the billions of devices connected to the descendant internet today.