Ray Tomlinson

Raymond Tomlinson died on March 5, 2016 in Lincoln, Massachusetts from a heart attack. He was 74.

Following his death, VA Shiva Ayyadurai, an American inventor of Indian origin, has claimed that it was he, and not Tomlinson who actually invented the email.

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born on April 23, 1941 in Amsterdam, New York. He had three brothers.

He received his primary education from the Broadalbin Central School in Broadalbin, New York. He then went to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) where he participated in the co-op program with IBM.

He graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1963. Following this he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There he worked in the Speech Communication Group and developed an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer and earned his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1965.

He was appointed by the technology company of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies) as a computer engineer in 1967. There he helped to develop the TENEX operating system.

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), an early packet switching network was a part of the TENEX operating system which also included TELNET implementations. Tomlinson, a pioneering computer genius, wrote a file transfer program called CPYNET to transfer files through the ARPANET.

During this period, a lot of developments were taking place in computer technology and networking. His employers asked him to work on SNDMSG which was an early electronic mail program which was used to send messages to other users of a time-sharing computer. He was told to change the program so that it could run on TENEX.

Tomlinson extended the program by adding code which he took from CPYNET to SNDMSG to create a version that enabled sending messages to users on other computers accessible over the ARPANET. He innovated the use of the “@” sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine.

His message sending innovation, launched in 1971, is generally believed to be the first email that was ever sent. The text of the first email Tomlinson sent was a test, so it was not preserved. According to his own accounts, it was a very forgettable message not worth remembering.

Raymond Tomlinson is widely credited as the inventor of email. In 1971 he updated an existing utility called SNDMSG so that it could copy messages over the network and sent a message from one Digital Equipment Corporation DEC-10 computer to another DEC-10. This message is regarded as the first email ever sent.