AMN /
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was a pioneering American computer programmer who implemented the first email program, passed away in Washington yesterday. He was 74. Tomlinson invented direct electronic messages between users on different machines on a certain network in 1971. Before then, users could only write messages to others using the same computer.
“A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers,” Raytheon spokesman Mike Doble said in a statement confirming his death.
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.
The tech world reacted with sadness over the passing of Tomlinson, who became a cult figure for his invention in 1971 of a program for ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor, that allowed people to send person-to-person messages to other computer users on other servers.
Raymond first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971. It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer.
To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since.
The Internet Hall of Fame in its account of his work commented “Tomlinson’s email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate”. Tomlinson is internationally known and credited as the inventor of the email.
Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York, but his family soon moved to the small, unincorporated village of Vail Mills, New York. He attended Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York. Later he attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York where he participated in the co-op program with IBM. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from RPI in 1963.
After graduating from RPI, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to continue his electrical engineering education. At MIT, Tomlinson worked in the Speech Communication Group and developed an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer as the subject of his thesis for the master’s degree in electrical engineering he received in 1965.
In 1967 he joined the technology company of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies), where he helped develop the TENEX operating system including ARPANET Network Control Program and TELNET implementations. He wrote a file-transfer program called CPYNET to transfer files through the ARPANET. Tomlinson was asked to change a program called SNDMSG, which sent messages to other users of a time-sharing computer, to run on TENEX. He added code he took from CPYNET to SNDMSG so messages could be sent to users on other computers—the first email.