On Saturday, the grandfather of the e-mail, Raymond Samuel Tomlinson, passed away of a suspected heart attack. He was 74 years old.
Back in 1971, Tomlinson worked in Boston at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), an R&D company that was instrumental in the development of the precursor to the internet, the ARPANET. At his time at BBN, Tomlinson came up with the SNDMSG command that would sent actual mail files to the recipent’s computers, making it the world’s first networked messaging program. It was then that Tomlinson would decide to use the “@” symbol to designate a user from its host, elevating the symbol from relative obscurity to an easily recognizable icon.
Tomlinson would go on to be a key driver in the development of standards for e-mail messages. Some of his contributions include the “From”, “Subject”, and date fields. In 2012, Tomlinson was inducted into the internet Hall Of Fame. The Internet Hall Of Fame biography page credit’s Tomlinson with “fundamentally changing the way people communicate.”
Source: The Verge, Sydney Morning Herald
