Tech industry pioneer invented email
Ray Tomlinson, who has died aged 74 on March 5, was a computer programmer generally credited as the man who invented the email, in the process transforming the way we communicate and socialize.
The first electronic messaging system, developed in the 1960s, would only allow messages to be exchanged between users on the same computer. In the late 1960s, however, the American Defence Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency launched the Arpanet, a program designed to create a network tying together disparate computer science programs it was funding around the country. This is now considered the precursor to the Internet.
In 1971, Tomlinson was working at the Boston- based technology company Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a major contractor on the Arpanet, trying, in his own words “to find things to use this newfangled network for.” He had heard about a proposal to send messages to be printed and stuffed away in mailboxes, and had the idea that messages should go to computers instead.
Borrowing a code from a filetransfer program he had created called Cpynet, Tomlinson modified an existing internal computer
messaging program so that messages could be sent between two machines that were side- by- side on his desk. When he wrote the program he needed to find a punctuation symbol to separate the name of the recipient from their computer location. He chose the symbol “@” ( known as the asperand), the least used sign and only preposition on the keyboard.
Tomlinson did not become rich from his invention, confessing that he had often wondered what fraction of a cent per @ sign it would it take to make him very comfortably off: “It’s a very small fraction.”
Tomlinson lived in Lincoln, Mass., where he and his partner Karen raised miniature sheep. She survives him with two daughters from an earlier marriage.