Ray Tomlinson has passed away at the age of 74. He was the man who invented the email as we know it today, including making the choice to use the “@” sign in an email address.
Tomlinson invented email in 1971 but he couldn’t say what the first email ever sent actually was.
When asked about it in an interview with the New York Times in 2009, Tomlinson explained, “I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other. The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them.”
“When I was satisfied that the program seemed to work, I sent a message to the rest of my group explaining how to send messages over the network,” he wrote. “The first use of network email announced its own existence.”
He created email because “it seemed like a neat idea,” he wrote.
Before his invention, electronic messages could be shared only on a very limited network but Ray Tomlinson created a system where a user on one network could send a message to someone on another network.
The development earned Tomlinson a spot in the Internet Hall of Fame as well as honors from a variety of organizations and publications.
Rip, Ray Tomlinson.
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