Last Saturday the Internet pioneer Ray Tomlinson (photo ©Andreu Vea, WiWiW.org) passed away, possibly due to a heart attack. He was best known for his inventions that created the modern e-mail system.

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born on April 23, 1941 in Amsterdam, New York, USA. He earned a Bachelor of Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and a master’s degree in electrical engineering at MIT in 1965.

In 1967 Ray Tomlinson joined Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which later became BBN Technologies, a company engaged in the development of the ARPANET, the network system whose development led to the Internet. It was there that he started contributing to the creation of various programs and protocols that influenced in various ways today’s Internet.

In the ’60s there were already e-mail systems but they were limited. Ray Tomlinson wrote the SNDMSG program, which was much more sophisticated because it was able to send e-mails to other computers. It was then that he introduced the use of the “@” symbol to separate the local e-mails from those to be sent to other computers. It’s said that his colleague Jerry Burchfiel recommended him not to tell anyone about it because they weren’t supposed to work on that.

The first e-mail sending test was carried out by Ray Tomlinson sending a message to another computer but to himself and became a source of a kind of urban legend: Tomlinson couldn’t remember what was ho wrote in the text and stated that it was something like “QWERTYUIOP”, which in the keyboard are the letters of the row under the numbers. Someone by mistake took it literaly.

For his contributions to the development of the Internet, over the years, Ray Tomlinson received a number of honors such as the George R. Stibitz Computer Pioneer Award, the Webby Award, the IEEE Internet Award and the Prince of Asturias Award. When the Internet Hall of Fame was opened in 2012 he was one of the first that were inducted in it.

Today we take for granted the availability of e-mails along with many other everyday tools that are part of the Internet. Ray Tomlinson was one of the protagonists of the creation of some of these tools that have been refined from the technical point of view but in the e-mail case still use the convention he devised.