Key change proved a stroke of genius
Ray Tomlinson Email inventor BORN APRIL 23, 1941 - DIED MARCH 5, 2016, AGED 74
ONE evening in 1971 while working at Boston- based technology company Bolt, Beranek and Newman ( BBN), Ray Tomlinson typed a message to himself, “Something like ‘ QWERTYUIOP’,” in the hope that it would travel from one computer to another via ARPANET, a network of computers that was the precursor to the internet.
Up until then users working from the same computer could send messages to one another using BBN’s messaging programs but there was no way to communicate from one computer to the next.
Tomlinson changed that when he applied the idea behind these programs to CYPNET which allowed users to send and receive files between computers.
To do this he needed a symbol to separate a username from a destination address and settled on the @ sign as it was rarely used and offered a clear break between the identity of the user and the host.
“As it turns out, @ is the only proposition on the keyboard,” he recalled. “I just looked at it and it was there.” In 2010 the Museum of Modern Art included the symbol in its architecture and design collection, calling it a“defining symbol of the computer age”.
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York and after graduating from high school he enrolled at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he was awarded a degree in electrical engineering in 1964.
A year later he earned a Master’s degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology after developing an analog- digital hybrid speech synthesizer.
Throughout much of the 1970s he worked on developing the first email standards and later worked on a variety of complex problems at BBN, including the “three- way handshake” which lets a computer set up the rules for communicating with a device such as a printer. Despite being the first person to send a network email the father- oftwo said he had no idea that his invention would revolutionise the way the world communicates.
Tomlinson, who was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, died of a suspected heart attack and is survived by daughters Brooke and Suzanne from an earlier marriage and partner Karen Seo.