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Inventor of email Raymond Tomlinson dies at 74

Xinhua, March 8, 2016 Adjust font size:

Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of email who first used the "@" symbol to separate the user name from the machine name, died of a heart attack on March 5 at the age of 74, Raytheon Company where he worked announced Monday.

Tomlinson was an American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system in 1971. The ARPANET, short for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was a precursor to the Internet.

The program was the first messaging system that was able to send mail between different users on different computers. Before that, computer messaging was limited on the same computer.

It was Tomlinson who made the historic choice to separate the name of his message's recipient from the name of the host computer using the "@" symbol when he first tested if the transmission worked.

The symbol, once an obscure accounting invoice abbreviation, since became one of the most universally recognized digital icons around the world.

Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 for his invention of modern email. He was honored for "a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate."

"I was looking for a method that did not require the person to be there when the message was sent and enabled the receiver to read and answer communications at their convenience," said Tomlinson at his induction ceremony. "I just had no notion whatsoever about what the ultimate impact would be."

Tomlinson had joined Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1967. BBN was acquired by Raytheon Co. in 2009.

Currently an estimated 2.6 billion people worldwide use email to communicate, sending more than 205 billion emails per day. Endit