h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the early days of the internet, there was another method of writing e-mail addresses, referred to as "bang notation." "Bang" is computer-ese for "exclamation point," much like we use "dot" to mean a period.

I believe bang notation had the order reversed, so to send e-mail to John Doe at AT&T, you would write "com.att!johndoe" or something along those lines.

Does anyone know why @ survived and bang died?

I guess its because the @ notation is easier to understand by new users and is more easily readable in english.

Being a hardware type person the idea of defining which server to send it to first, then the account name makes perfect sense to me as it makes routing the message easier.

But thats not the way it turned out

Bang notation required a complete route to be specified, whereas At notation uses end-point addressing only.
An example of bang notation would be something like

hoover!uiuc!matlab!bobby

Hoover, uiuc, and matlab are all individual systems; the address indicates that hoover can talk to uiuc, which can talk to matlab, which can store the message for bobby.

The obvious limitation is that you had to know a lot about HOW to get your message delivered. Just think how obnoxious it would be if you had to specify which post offices were needed to handle your mail on its way from San Francisco to Miami.

Ah, I knew if I waited for 3 and a half years I would get an answer.

Many thanks. It's no wonder that bang notation died out. If forced to use it, I think I could e-mail to my university's main system from my department server, but not much further than that. I really have no idea where it goes after I click the "send" button.