Ray Tomlinson, the creator of email, has died
Ray Tomlinson, widely credited as the creator of
email, has died. His employer, Raytheon, told CNN on Sunday. He was 74.
Tomlinson invented direct email messages in 1971.
Before his invention, electronic messages could be shared only on a very
limited network.
Among those paying tribute was Gmail, one of many
offshoots of Tomlinson's creation.
"Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email
and putting the @ sign on the map," Gmail's Twitter account said.
Tomlinson, a graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic
Institute and MIT, was working for a Boston technology firm in 1971 when he
decided to figure out a way for people to send messages via computer. At the
time, Tomlinson recalled, ARPANET -- the Internet's predecessor -- was fairly
new and the idea of sending messages from computer to computer was novel.
Computers themselves 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 had 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."
Why bother at all, given the limited number of people
using computers in those days?
Well, Tomlinson told the Verge, 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," he said. "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."
For a couple decades thereafter, email was a novelty.
It wasn't until the explosion of the personal computer, followed by online
services in the late '80s and early '90s -- including America Online, Prodigy
and CompuServe -- that email became widespread.
In the age of texting, social media and smartphones,
email has become somewhat less important to everyday communication, but it's
still pervasive: there were 3.9 billion email accounts in 2013, according to a study by the Radicati Group, and the number
continues to grow. Business alone accounts for 100 billion emails sent and
received per day, as of 2013. (How much is actually read is another question.)
Tomlinson told the Verge his invention had worked out
pretty much as he'd imagined, though the scale was far greater.
"I see email being used, by and large, exactly
the way I envisioned. In particular, it's not strictly a work tool or strictly
a personal thing," he said. "Everybody uses it in different ways, but
they use it in a way they find works for them."
Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame
in 2012.
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