Inventor of email and savior of the @ sign, Ray Tomlinson, is dead at 74
Source: The Verge
A computing legend has died. The inventor of email, Ray Tomlinson, suffered an apparent heart attack on Saturday, according to reports. He was 74 years old.
Tomlinson 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.
Others had thought about sending messages to other users before, and there were some early versions that let you share notes to users on the same computer, but Tomlinson came up with the SNDMSG command. Unlike what came before it, SNDMSG actually sent mail files to the recipient's computers. It was the first networked messaging program.
He also decided to use the @ symbol to designate a user from its host. The decision lifted the humble symbol from obscurity to international icon — it even entered MOMA's collection in 2010. The fact it was little-used at the time made it appealing to Tomlinson, as it reduced ambiguity. Also, as he liked to say, "It's the only preposition on the keyboard."
Read more: http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/6/11168718/ray-tomlinson-dead-inventor-of-email-obituary
= new reply since forum marked as read
Summer '81 worked for DARCOM as an intern. Back in the days when we snagged test data on tape and had to run it from the field recording stations back to the data processing center. ("Damned, some of the data must have fallen off the tape when we went over that bump."
We were using something on our terminals called "LARK" or "LARC" (our refrain was "Lark is a lemon" . It would stay up and running about as long as your typical mortar shell.
At least we could text message each other on screen. No, that wasn't the entirety of the software package, but we thought it was cool. It was also about the only part of the package we thought worth keeping. What did we know, we were interns.
At a student government meeting in, oh, '93 or '94 we asked the UCLA prof who'd helped send the very first keyboard-entered text message in the '60s on the precursor to ARPANET to speak to us. He was sort of the First One. He was also fair: ARPANET was not the precursor to the Internet, it was a precursor to one of the nets that the Internet was "inter" to, and he mentioned a lot of the researchers, private, governmental, and academic, that had contributed to the Internet protocols (esp. CERN, hardly a branch of the US government). In '94 I knew how useful the Internet would become. And already when non-users were given their first logins on the university system and taught to do searches, they searched on themselves and those they knew and were shocked at how exposed they were. If you did IRC, there it was, forever. Libertarians were outraged. Geeks were geeky. Those politically aware, right and left, looked for dirt on political opponents (student politics), and rubbed their hands with glee when they found some and complained bitterly at how unfair the universe and how Something Must Be Done when dirt was found on them. The next 20 years of privacy complaints squeezed into the first 30 minutes of their Internet lives. I guess we must have been using Lycos.
This guy's choice of @ was fine for some countries/languages. Others didn't have it and suddenly needed to include it in their keyboards.
And somewhere on some deadbricked machine I have a copy of Mosaic....
People were in chat rooms and sending emails long before.
If you had access to (usually military or government) addresses you could send much earlier (like I said, 1976 in my case). You could also send email, participate in group chats, and forums, on major systems (university systems, I was on Dartmouth Kewitt, or DEC's DECWorld) (only open to employees) but then things like AOL with their CD-of-the-week and CompuServe and whatever else gave a more expanded shopping/communication experience - still email, forums, chat rooms, but blogs, topical groupings and everything else). The formalization of the web in 1993 still took a couple of years to get retooled as everyone learned to have servers and what a T-1 line was, but pretty soon the decentralized nature (and often open source, and often free cost) of the web started a line out the door as everybody was leaving and feeling the power ("the bern?" for themselves. You know the rest.
Interestingly, a few years ago I started a little personal project to figure out what the "@" sign was called. I mean, the exclamation point is considered an intensifier, the "&" sign is called an ampersand, the star "*" is called an asterisk, so I figured the "@" sign must have a formal name too.
After a fair amount of research (about as much as I could manage) all I could find out is that it's literally called an "at" sign. I can't find a more formal name than that.
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