Inventor of the e-mail address with @ sign died
The man who sent the first e-mail between computers and invented the typical addresses with the @ sign is dead. Ray Tomlinson died Saturday at the age of 74, his employer, the U.S. defense contractor Raytheon, confirmed to CNN.
In 1971, during the development of the Internet precursor Arpanet, Tomlinson modified existing protocols so that electronic messages could also be sent between two computers. Before that, only users of one computer could leave messages for each other. At that time, years before the start of the PC era, computers were still large machines used by many people.
Tomlinson was also the one who resorted to the @ sign to designate the computer of the addressee. The symbol had originally been used by merchants to mark the unit price of a product - "for example, ten items @ $1.95," as Tomlinson himself later explained. He said he used the "at" (German: zu, bei) instead for spatial attribution. "It just made sense."
Tomlinson, on the other hand, couldn't remember the content of the first email. The test messages contained nothing memorable, he wrote on his website. "Most likely, the first message was QWERTYUIOP (the first letters on an English keyboard) or something like that."
Admitted to the Hall of Honor of the Internet Society
Tomlinson was inducted into the International Internet Society's "Hall of Honor" in the "Inventor" category in 2012. According to the organization, his email software was widely used for years and was an "exceptional innovative solution.
"A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who created email for us in the early days of computer networks," highlighted his employer, U.S. defense contractor Raytheon. "His work changed the way the world communicates - and yet, for all his accomplishments, he remained humble, kind and generous."
Messages of condolence arrived from around the world. Google's Gmail team wrote on the short message service Twitter: "Thank you Ray Tomlinson for inventing email and making the @ sign popular." Vint Cerf, who is considered one of the fathers of the Internet and once worked at the U.S. military research agency Darpa, also lamented the "very sad news" of Tomlinson's passing. (SDA)
Teaser image: Duden.de
