Ray Tomlinson
The man who invented email as the world knows it has died. Ray Tomlinson conceived of the first bit of test e-mail which included the distinguishing symbol @ to separate the user from the host. Tomlinson created the send message (SNDMSG) command which directed mail to a recipients doorstep — his computer. Mr. Tomlinson is said to have died Saturday of an apparent heart attack at the age of 74. He sent the very first email back in 1971. At the time, he was working in Boston at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), a company that was instrumental in the development of a very early version of the internet, called ARPANET. As an employee, he was “looking for problems [ARPANET] could solve,” Tomlinson told The Verge in a 2012 interview. He decided to use the @ symbol because it had almost no use at the time being mostly employed as a symbol to specify the price of produce per piece e.g. apples @ 25 cents. Sadly, the very first email has been lost. As Tomlinson said: “The first e-mail was completely forgettable and (was) therefore, forgotten.”
