Tomlinson was one of a group 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 computers on their site. Other scientists could view the messages in the mailbox. But there were other computer at other sites 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 computer. 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.