Ray Tomlinson
folcloreO engenheiro da BBN que em 1971 fez uma mensagem alcançar uma pessoa em outra máquina, e escolheu a arroba para dizer qual.
Ninguém pediu. A descrição de um colega é que aquilo não era tarefa nenhuma - ele estava brincando, procurando o que fazer com a ARPANET - e construiu enxertando código do próprio programa de transferência de arquivos numa ferramenta local de mensagens. A convenção de endereçamento que improvisou numa tarde sobreviveu a todo sistema desenhado para substituí-la, e a caixa postal veio a ser o caminho de recuperação de quase toda outra conta de uma pessoa, papel que especificação nenhuma lhe atribuiu.
Também conhecido como: tomlinson, first email, at sign
Fontes
- 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