Ray Tomlinson
loreThe BBN engineer who in 1971 made a message reach a person on a different machine, and picked the at sign to say which one.
Nobody asked him to. A colleague's description is that it was not an assignment at all - he was fooling around, looking for something to do with the ARPANET - and he built it by grafting code from his own file transfer program onto a local messaging tool. The addressing convention he improvised in an afternoon has outlived every system designed to replace it, and the mailbox went on to become the recovery path for nearly every other account a person owns, which is a role no specification ever assigned it.
Also known as: tomlinson, first email, at sign
Sources
- Wikipedia: Ray Tomlinson - invented the first email program on the ARPANET system in 1971, the first able to send mail between users on different hosts
- Tomlinson at BBN modifying SNDMSG with code from his CPYNET file transfer program to send messages across the ARPANET, on his own initiative rather than as a commissioned project
- A Raytheon spokesman noting that developing email was not an assignment at all - he was just fooling around, looking for something to do with the ARPANET; inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012 and died in 2016 aged 74
- Internet Hall of Fame inductee page: beyond the message itself he designed a tool for creating and reading email and led work on the first email standards - in 1972 he was among the participants in the meeting to extend FTP to carry email, the arrangement used until SMTP replaced it in 1982, and he co-authored RFC 561 of September 1973, the first standard for internet email message formats, which defined From, Subject and Date; he died in March 2016