Ray Tomlinson invented the e-mail and father of the at sign, died – L’Express

He never had the reputation of a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckeberg. Still, Ray Tomlinson contributed decisively to the growth of computing. The engineer, considered one of the forerunners of the mail, died Saturday at the age of 74.

The American engineer has long worked with the company BBN (Bolt, Beranek, and Newman) who developed Arpanet, the computer network that prefigures Internet.

Originally, the network founded by the US government linked together several research organizations, says Slate. If researchers were exchanging messages in the 1960s, they did so on a single computer, on which they could connect remotely.

The @ way to distinguish the user of the machine

The revolution took place in 1971, with the program called “SNDMSG” for “send message”. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson sends a first email traveling on the network. It also designs the program “readmail” which allows you to retrieve and read these messages. The first letter is sent “QWERTUYOP”, the first line of the keyboard says Le Point.

Ray Tomlinson is also the origin of the email address created to identify the author of the message and the recipient. To distinguish the user and the machine used to send or read a message, it decides to use the @ symbol, “at” (in) in English. The at sign will be needed later as a sign that identifies an email address, or more recently a Twitter account.

The engineer has received several awards in recognition of its innovations. In 2009 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award in Science and Technology. In 2012, he entered the “Hall of Fame of the Internet” in the category of innovators.