Ray Tomlinson, Email Inventor Dies

Another computer industry legend has left us. Email inventor Ray Tomlinson died on Saturday morning, presumably from a heart attack. He was 74 years old.


Tomlinson sent the first e-mail in 1971. At that time, he worked at Boston at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), which developed the first version of the Internet, ARPAnet, under a contract with DARPA. As an employee, Tomlinson had to “look for tasks that ARPAnet can solve,” he said in a 2012 interview .


Computer from which first email was sent
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Before him, there were ideas of sending messages from one computer to another, as well as early versions of programs for sending messages to other users on the same computer. But Ray Tomlinson invented the SNDMSG team. Unlike the others, this command actually transmitted files with an email message to the recipient’s computer. It was the first network messaging program. Until 1982, the FTP protocol was used to transfer mail, until SMTP was invented.

Tomlinson suggested using the @ (at) icon to denote a user from a specific host. This decision returned the @ symbol from forgetting and made it an international standard. The engineer specifically chose this symbol because it was practically not used anywhere, so it was difficult to interpret it ambiguously.

Now the @ icon in different countries is called differently. In Israel, it is strudel (roll), in Croatia - a monkey, in China - a little mouse, in Russia - a dog.

Tomlinson and colleagues developed standards for the "From", "Subject" and "Date" headers ( RFC 561 standard), which are now present in every email.

Unfortunately, the very first email in history is now lost. Tomlinson said that there was nothing to look at, he sent himself letters from one computer to another - just random lines of text that you can forget.

Thanks to his invention, we will not forget Ray Tolinson himself.

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