Posted on 03/06/2016 4:31:49 PM PST by Olog-hai
Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and a technological leader, died Saturday.
Raytheon Co., his employer, confirmed his death; the details were not immediately available.
Email existed in a limited capacity before Tomlinson in that electronic messages could be shared amid multiple people within a limited framework. But until his invention in 1971 of the first network person-to-person email, there was no way to send something to a specific person at a specific address.
Tomlinson wrote and sent the first email on the ARPANET system, a computer network that was created for the U.S. government that is considered a precursor to the Internet. Tomlinson also contributed to the network’s development, among numerous other pioneering technologies in the programming world. …
(Excerpt) Read more at bigstory.ap.org ...
Cool story! Thanks for posting.
Oh I thought Al Gore did that (snicker).
Was it to Al Gore?
I have been watching “The Americans” this evening and it takes place in the early eighties———ARPANET is mentioned frequently in Season Two.
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Hillary approves. Now she can blame him for everything.
Interesting point he makes about how he saved the @ sign!
Oh! So it’s his fault I can’t get away from this damn phone?!?
Hmmm...... Fidonet?
How can this be? I thought Al Gore invented email.
The Wiki description of the first reception his innovation in which he used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine. Before, the "Mail" was only sent to users of the same machine. The story I like is: "At first, his email messaging system was not thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to his colleague Jerry Burchfiel, Tomlinson said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on.""
Yes, it was text based email. And still today, Friends do not Send Friends HTML (in emails).
Especially not HTML emails with scripts.
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