Email Inventor Ray Tomlinson dies aged 74
It's a sad day for the Internet: Ray Tomlinson, the American programmer widely credited with inventing email as we know it, has died from a suspected heart attack He was 74 and worked in the company's Cambridge, Massachusetts, office.
He discovered the first networked email system on ARPANET In 1971, using the familiar user@host format that's still in use today.
Earlier, users could only write emails to others using the same computer. But In 1971, Tomlinson developed direct electronic messages between users on different machines on a certain network.
“A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us the email in the early days of networked computers,” his employer, Raytheon, said in a statement.
Tomlinson also changed the language itself. His decision of the @ symbol for email promoted a once-specialty character , making it synonymous with all things the internet. Twitter would be a very different place without @ mentions that offer the US some assistance with chatting with different users, and numerous other services use it as a simple approach to share status updates. He was the first to use the @ symbol in this way, to distinguish a user from its host.
Tomlinson got his offer of formal recognition. He's a keystone of the Internet Hall of Fame, and he got everything from a Webby Award to a Prince of Asturias Laureate in 2000. However, he almost doesn't need those.
“His work changed the way the world communicates and yet, for all his accomplishments, he remained humble, kind and generous with his time and talents, He will be missed by one and all.”
The system changed the way people communicate both in business and in personal life, revolutionizing how “millions of people shop, bank, and stay in contact with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans”, reads his biography on the Internet Hall of Fame website.
“He was pretty philosophical about it all,” Kuzman said. “And was surprisingly not addicted to email.”