March 7, 2016 – US programmer and creator of email, Ray Tomlinson is dead. He was 74.
Tomlinson invented email in 1971 at a time that electronic messages could only be shared very limited network’.
Tomlinson is a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT. He thoughtof the need for people to send out messages through the computer in 1971 while working for a Boston technology firm.
Speaking about his invention, Tomlinson said ARPANET — the Internet’s predecessor — was fairly new and the idea of sending messages from computer to computer was novel and that computers then were often giant mainframe beasts that filled entire rooms.
“Computers were very expensive — I think one we had here, for example, was something on the order of two or three hundred thousand dollars. That’s 1970 dollars. They were a scarce resource,” he told the Verge in 2012.
Tomlinson was said to have seen a mailbox protocol he’d thought was too complex. In its place, he hacked together a simpler plan that included such now-commonplace concepts as the “@” sign — to denote the location of the correspondents — and the naming of the fields.
The reason for the “@” sign was mundane, he told NPR: Not only was it a little-used symbol, but “it’s the only preposition on the keyboard. The telephone was fine, “but someone had to be there to receive the call.” No voicemail back then; there were few answering machines and people who could afford it subscribed to answering services.
“Everyone latched onto the idea that you could leave messages on the computer. As the network grew and the growth of all that accelerated, it became a really useful tool: there were millions of people you could potentially reach,” he said in an interview.
