Who is ray tomlinson

Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. Fortnite Game of Thrones Books. Comics Music. Filed under: Web Tech. Inventor of email and savior of the sign, Ray Tomlinson, is dead at 74 New, 28 comments. Linkedin Reddit Pocket Flipboard Email. Next Up In Tech. Sign up for the newsletter Verge Deals Subscribe to get the best Verge-approved tech deals of the week. Just one more thing! Please confirm your subscription to Verge Deals via the verification email we just sent you.

Email required. It's widely accepted that it's not an efficient communication method, and it disrupts the focus of anyone trying to get things done. Read more from Dave here. Email: Flawed, but never bettered. Employers 'can read private messages'. What's it like to have your emails investigated? Online chats: What your boss can see. Internet Hall of Fame. Image source, AP. Ray Tomlinson said the contents of the first test email were "completely forgettable".

Tinkering on his own, he decided to build a networked messaging program. Most computers at the time allowed users to message one another, but as so few computers were networked, there was little reason to send messages across computers.

Tomlinson hacked together a solution, using the now-ubiquitous symbol to indicate networked email. Four decades later, email seems less an invention than an innate aspect of our digital environment. On the occasion of his induction into the Internet Hall of Fame , Tomlinson talked to us about the birth of email, the future of communication technology, and how he feels about spam.

I worked on a couple of projects in the computer center here, including applications for our time-sharing system. We started working on a replacement for our time-sharing system, which was a SDS, built by Sigma Data Systems, who are no longer around. That was working by or early Just over a month later they delivered the second one to Stanford Research Institute.

About a year later we got our connection, and once we did we starting writing software to do the Network Control Protocol NCP , Telnet, and some other protocols that were becoming standard at the time. I looked at it and thought probably we could do something better. What I thought would be better was a simpler protocol. As proposed the protocol had a lot to do with how to put ink onto paper — formatting issues, where the formfeeds went, what tab meant, all that sort of stuff.

With time-sharing systems, and computers in general, what you really want to do is send messages to people, not numbered mailboxes. So I decided to modify a program. Remember, this notion of sending messages to other users on the computer had been around for at least six years by then, perhaps even more. All the applications I was aware of, though, involved a single computer. So time-sharing was the way to go in my mind. Computers were very expensive — I think one we had here, for example, was something on the order of two or three hundred thousand dollars.