FactSentinel

The first email was sent in 1971 by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson, who worked on ARPANET, the precursor to the modern internet. Tomlinson developed a system that allowed messages to be sent between different computers on the network, and he is credited with introducing the "@" symbol to separate the user's name from their machine's address, a convention still used in email addresses today. This innovation predates the World Wide Web by roughly two decades.

The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 while he was working at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory. Berners-Lee proposed a system of interlinked hypertext documents that could be accessed via the internet, and the first website went live in 1990, with public access expanding in 1991. This means the Web is fundamentally a different technology than email, and it emerged nearly 20 years after email's invention.

A common misconception is conflating "the internet" with "the World Wide Web," treating them as synonymous. In reality, the internet is the underlying global network of interconnected computers, while the Web is just one application that runs on top of it, used for browsing websites. Email is another separate application that predates the Web and does not rely on it to function. This distinction explains why email could exist and be used for years before anyone could open a web browser or visit a website.