Email inventor Raymond Tomlinson has passed away

Raymond Tomlinson, known as the inventor of email, has died aged 74. He was the first to send an email in 1971 and implement the @ sign to compose email addresses.

Born in the US state of New York, Tomlinson was involved in the development of Arpanet in the 1960s, which is regarded as the forerunner of the modern internet. There he was involved in implementing email; previously it was only possible to send messages to users using the same host. To separate users and hosts, Tomlinson uses the @ sign, which is still used today to define email addresses.

The program used to send the very first email was called Sndmsg. What was in the first email is not entirely clear: Tomlinson said earlier that he could not quite remember it, but that it was something insignificant like ‘qwertyuiop’. To build Sndmsg, Tomlinson needed only 200 lines of code.

For his contributions, Tomlinson was inducted into the US Internet Hall of Fame. Not just for sending the very first email, but also for helping set email standards that are still used today. Tomlinson turned 74 years old.