Inventor of the email passes away at the age of 74

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March 7, 2016 3:51 PM

Tomlinson had an idea to use a new network (and a predecessor to the Internet) to send a text message between two computers, routing it using an "@" symbol.

Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of the email

Ray Tomlinson, the man who created the email, has passed away today at the age of 74, according to a Time report.

Tomlinson, who died of a heart attack, was part of a team of computer programmers at research and design company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, Mass., and first started experimenting with internal messaging in 1971.

Tomlinson had an idea to use a new network (and a predecessor to the Internet) to send a text message between two computers, routing it using an "@" symbol.

In an interview from 2009 with NPR, he recalled the first interview: “The keyboards were about 10 feet apart…I could wheel my chair from one to the other and type a message on one, and then go to the other, and then see what I had tried to send.”

The US government and military had started to use the system by the 1980s. By the 1990s, the email, along with the World Wide Web, had become one of the two pillars of the consumer Internet.

Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

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