Modern Email Inventor Ray Tomlinson Died Of Heart Attack At 74

The man who is widely credited as the inventor of the email, Ray Tomlinson, has died at the age of 74, on 5th March 2016. The American programmer, who sent what is widely regarded as the first electronic mail and saved the widely-used @ symbol from possible extinction, died of a reported heart attack. In 1971, while working as an engineer at Massachusetts research and development company Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Tomlinson sent a message between two computers on the ARPANET system.

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was an American computer programmer who implemented the first email system on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971. It was for the first time a system was enabled to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To achieve this, Tomlinson used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since. The Internet Hall of Fame in their account of his work commented "Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate".

Today, more than 200 billion emails are now sent every day, and the same format is relied on for mass communication at work and in personal lives, with more than 4 billion accounts in existence. Tomlinson contributed to formats such as the email’s subject line as it grew in popularity before the explosion of the web in 1990. The @ is now used in the usual email template as well as on many other internet services such as Twitter and Instagram, and is common shorthand for “at”.

Ray Tomlinson was born in New York in 1941 and was inducted into the internet hall of fame in 2012. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate detailed his work on his blog, stating that, "The first message was sent between two machines that were literally side by side" connected only through ARPANET, he wrote on his blog. " 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. "Most likely the first message was QWERTYUIOP or something similar," he added, referring to the first letters on the traditional English-language keyboard. "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. The first use of network email announced its own existence."

Tomlinson received his share of formal recognition. He's a cornerstone of the Internet Hall of Fame, and he received everything from a Webby Award to a Prince of Asturias Laureate. However, he almost doesn't need those. Much like fellow internet pioneers Tim Berners-Lee or Vint Cerf, you're encountering his legacy virtually every time you hop online. And barring a sea change in communication, it's likely that the effect of his work will be felt for decades to come.

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