It’s been 40 years (and a week or two) since email as we know it was invented.

Here’s  a brief extract on the history of email taken from stuff.co.nz:

“Internal messaging systems have existed since the 1960s but in 1971 Tomlinson was helping build ARPANET for the US Department of Defence and laying the foundations of the modern internet. Tomlinson needed an easy way to send electronic messages between the various computers hooked up to ARPANET. He chose @ – generally referred to as the ”at” symbol – to designate that a message was intended for a specific user ”at” a specific organisation. The email protocol continued to develop but, for the next 20 years, it was restricted to academic and military use.

The internet was opened up for commercial use in the 1990s and email went mainstream.”