Ray Tomlinson: Inventor of Email Dead at 74

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email and the man who picked the @ symbol for addresses, has died aged 74.

“A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers,” Raytheon spokesperson Mike Doble said in a statement.

Doble said Tomlinson died on Saturday morning but he did not know if he was at home and did not have a confirmed cause of death. Tomlinson worked in the company’s office in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

When Tomlinson invented the “user@host” standard for email addresses, it was applied at DARPA’s ARPANET, a US government computer network that is considered the Internet’s precursor.

He was the first to use the @ symbol in this way, to distinguish a user from its host.

At the time personal computers were virtually unknown, and the use of personal email — now a keystone of electronic communications — would not be adopted at a mass scale until the 1990s.

– First message ‘QWERTYUIOP’? –

Tomlinson, a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, detailed his creation on his blog in an attempt to prevent legend from overtaking the facts.

“The first message was sent between two machines that were literally side by side” connected only through ARPANET, Tomlinson wrote.

“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 row of 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.”