Ray Tomlinson, inventor of modern email, 1941-2016

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email, has died at the age of 74.

Email existed in a limited capacity before Mr Tomlinson’s work, in that electronic messages could be shared amid multiple people within a limited framework.

But until his invention in 1971 of the first network person-to-person email there was no way to send something to a specific person at a specific address.

While he was a holder of numerous awards and other accolades, colleagues say he was humble and modest, and surprisingly, not a frequent checker of email.

The first email was sent on the ARPANET system, a computer network created for the US government that is considered a precursor to the internet. Mr Tomlinson also contributed to its development.

At the time, few people had personal computers. The popularity of personal email would not take off until years later but has become an integral part of modern life.

“It wasn’t an assignment at all, he was just fooling around; he was looking for something to do with ARPANET,” a spokeswoman for his employer Raytheon said of his creation of network email.

Mr Tomlinson once said in a company interview that he created email “mostly because it seemed like a neat idea”. The first email was sent between two machines that were side-by-side, according to that interview.