Tomlinson was one of agroup of scientists who were working on developing better computers.
The scientists at his site were able to send a message to a "mailbox" on the computer on their
site. Other scientists could view the messages in the mailbox . But there were other computers at
other siter where scientists were working on the same project. Tomlinson's idea was to figure out
a way to deliver messages to mailboxes on those remote computers. He used the @ sign to identify
messages that were headed out of the local machine to the more distant ones. That was the start of
the emailing systems that we still use today.