Ray Tomlinson
American computer programmer (1941–2016)
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Through Email, ARPANET and User (computing)
The Internet Hall of Fame in its account of his work commented "Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate." He is credited with the invention of the TCP three-way handshake which underlies HTTP and many other key Internet protocols.
Early life and education
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York, but his family soon moved to the small, unincorporated village of Vail Mills, New York. His father Raymond Tomlinson worked in carpet mills and later worked in the grocery business. His mother Dorothy Tomlinson worked for a dry cleaner. He attended Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York. Later he attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York, where he participated in the co-op program with IBM. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from RPI in 1963.
After graduating from RPI, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to continue his electrical engineering education. At MIT, Tomlinson worked in the Speech Communication Group, focusing on speech synthesis. He became interested in computers after seeing students play Spacewar!. Enthralled by the video game, he spent more time working with digital systems and integrated them into his thesis project. He developed an analog–digital hybrid speech synthesizer as the subject of his thesis for the master's degree in electrical engineering, which he received in 1965.
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Career
In 1967, he joined the technology company of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN; now Raytheon BBN), where he helped develop the TENEX operating system including the ARPANET Network Control Program, implementations of Telnet, and implementations on the self-replicating programs Creeper and Reaper.
Tomlinson also developed CPYNET, a file transfer program designed to transmit files between computers connected to the ARPANET. In 1971, he was asked to adapt an existing program called SNDMSG—which allowed users to leave messages for others on the same time-sharing computer—so that it could run on TENEX. He incorporated source code from CPYNET into SNDMSG, enabling users to send messages to others on different computers over the network. This innovation marked the creation of the first networked email system.
The first email Tomlinson sent was a test message between two computers placed side by side. The content of the message was not preserved, and Tomlinson later described it as insignificant, likely consisting of a random string such as "QWERTYUIOP." This is often misquoted as "The first e-mail was QWERTYUIOP." He later stated, "The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them."
To distinguish destination addresses from local usernames, Tomlinson selected the @ symbol to indicate the recipient's location (user@host), a format that remains standard in email addressing. The symbol was chosen because it was not used in usernames or in TENEX programming, and it intuitively conveyed the intended meaning. The @ sign, which was relatively obscure at the time, was added to the Museum of Modern Art's architecture and design collection in 2010, credited to Tomlinson and described as a "defining symbol of the computer age."
Initially, the email messaging system was not considered significant. Its development was not directed by his employer, and Tomlinson pursued the idea independently, stating that it "seemed like a neat idea." Upon demonstrating the system to a colleague, he remarked, "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on." Despite its informal origins, the system quickly gained popularity within the ARPANET research community and became one of the network's most enduring applications. Tomlinson later remarked that he was not particularly surprised by the eventual widespread use of email, stating, "I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned."
Tomlinson said he preferred "email" over "e-mail," joking in a 2010 interview that "I'm simply trying to conserve the world's supply of hyphens" and that "the term has been in use long enough to drop the hyphen."
Later life and death
Tomlinson remained at BBN for the rest of his career, serving as a principal scientist. In his personal life, he maintained a minimal relationship with consumer technology. Adrienne LaFrance of The Atlantic described him as a "self-professed Luddite," noting that he did not own a mobile phone and had only recently created a Facebook account.
Tomlinson died of a heart attack on March 5, 2016, at his home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, at the age of 74. News of his death drew attention and tributes from the technology community, including a message from Vint Cerf, co-developer of the TCP/IP protocol and a founding architect of the Internet.