Death Ray Tomlinson invented the e-mail – ZDNet France

Rarely mentioned among the Internet’s founding fathers, Ray Samuel Tomlinson nothing wrong either. This engineer, died at the age of 74, had indeed formalized the first implementations of e-mail in the ARPANET project he was working on in the early 70s.
 

Born in 1941 in the state of New York, in 1963 Tomlinson gets a license electrical engineering before joining the MIT to work on a thesis on a voice synthesizer project. He then worked in teams of developers of Bolt Beranek and Newman in particular working on the integration of the Arpanet protocol in the development of the OS TENEX. It was at this time that he developed the CPYNET program that copies files to a remote machine using the Arpanet network.

He then decided to combine this first program to another already used SNDMSG program that allowed a user to send a messenger to another user using the same machine at a time when access to computers was done on the principle of shared time. To differentiate the user of the machine used, Ray Tomlinson decided to use the @ character: it is no longer used and therefore not likely to conflict with other possible interpretation for the machine. As Forbes reported in 1998, Tomlinson saw his invention as a side project. Showing his program to his colleague Jeff Burchiel he had ordered not to talk, explaining that he was not supposed to work on it.

 The first email is sent at that time by Tomlinson that tests the capabilities of its new program before announcing his availability to the rest of the group. One of the Arpanet project managers became infatuated with this new feature and it began to democratize thereafter. 30 years later, he was awarded numerous prizes and awards for his work, such as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Internet Award.