Raymond Samuel Tomlinson, considered the inventor of email, died Saturday, March 5 at the age of 74. His death was confirmed by his employer, the US group Raytheon, without indicating the cause “A very sad news: Ray Tomlinson died.” , wrote on Facebook Vinton Cerf, one of the ” fathers of the Internet “.
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born April 23, 1941 in Amsterdam in the State of New York. After secondary schooling at Broadalbin Central School, he joined the Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy (New York), where he participated in an IBM computer by the group proposed internship program before obtaining a degree in electrical engineering in 1963. A specialty in which he continues to improve at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Two years later, loop a thesis on the development of a hybrid analog-digital voice synthesizer.
M.Tomlinson began his professional career in 1967 at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a company high technology based in Cambridge (Massachusetts), now a subsidiary of the Raytheon group. There he participated in a small group of programmers working on developing the TENEX operating system. In 1971, the engineer is part of the team of the program ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which is at the origin of Internet data transfer. It develops in particular the first application, which allows you to send messages from one computer to another by combining two programs: SNDMSG and CPYNET. For this, he developed the first electronic address using the famous “@” sign, which appears today in all of our emails.
Awards MIT 150 largest inventions and ideas
Contrary to legend, he is not the inventor of the at sign, which was used for the first time in 1536 by a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi. “I am often asked why I chose this sign, but it was quite logical” , had detailed M.Tomlinson, explaining that he had to find “a means of distinguish local mail mail passing through the network “. Originally, “The purpose of the sign was to indicate a unit price [for example, 10 items @ $ 1.95]. I used this sign to indicate that the user was “at home” [ "at" in English] other host rather than locally situated “. The fact that the acronym is not in any name or common name was an ideal tool. User @ host would become the global standard for email.
The first real experiment is performed in 1971. “The first message was sent between two machines that were literally side by side , he recalled. The only physical link that connected the [apart from the soil on which they were asked] was the ARPANET. I sent a number of messages to myself from one machine to another. The texts of these messages were not memorized and I forgot them. The first message was probably QWERTYUIOP [letters of the first line of an English keyboard] or something like that. When I found 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 an email network announced its own existence. “
The time of the rewards that came a few decades later with the spread of personal computers and the Internet explosion . In 2000, the same year that a certain Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, M.Tomlinson Receives Prestigious Geoge Stibitz, which is awarded to researchers who have helped to achieve major advances in the field of computing and communications. In 2001, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences awarded him a Webby Award, and in 2009 he won the Prince of Asturias Award, the most prestigious Spanish award along with Martin Cooper, the inventor of the first portable phone . M.Tomlinson is ranked fourth among the winners of the MIT of the 150 greatest inventions and ideas.
Despite all these awards, his colleagues described him as someone of great humility, which, paradoxically used emails sparingly. He lived in Lincoln (Massachusetts), where in addition to his principal researcher working at Raytheon, he raised sheep dwarfs.
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