It was one of the pioneers of the Web, without it you probably would not be in the process of your mail checker: Ray Tomlinson died Saturday, March 5 from a heart attack at the age of 74. It was in 1971 that this computer engineer, who was not satisfied with the communication protocol used previously on Arpanet, decided to facilitate the sending of e-mails on the Internet precursor network for scientists and US military . Tomlinson then wrote two programs: the first, named SNDMSG, used to send messages, and the second readmail, serves to collect and read those messages that users of Arpanet already calling “mail”
<. p> But it does not stop there: to identify the sender and the receiver of the email, he had the idea to use the old symbol @ printing, the at sign already used on typewriters that US means “at” in English. “I was looking at my keyboard, wondering” what am I going to choose on it that is not a letter that can be confused with the user’s name? “[ ...] the @ sign is what made the most sense because users were bound to an address “at” “ tell he later Wired magazine
First message.: “QWERTUYOP”
Everything is ready for the first sending e-mail: Tomlinson told the London Times a few years ago that this inaugural message of the digital age was limited to “QWERTUYOP” , the first line of his computer keyboard. Therefore, Arpanet, previously dedicated to data transfer, can be used to communicate from one end to the other of the planet. the rest of the story is known: forty-five years later, the Internet is omnipresent in our lives, and humanity exchange about 200 billion emails per day …
Ray Tomlinson was awarded the 2009 prize Prince of Asturias Science and technology. In 2012, he was also joined the “Internet Hall of Fame” in the category of innovators. But strangely, his name was much less known geeks than other fathers of the internet as Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web) or Vinton Cerf (father of the TCP / IP protocol). This made him sober tribute on Twitter:
In this video (in English), Tomlinson is seen telling his wonderful invention in all modesty:
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