The inventor of @ symbol passes away

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email and the man who picked the @ symbol for addresses passed away at the age of 74. He died on Saturday morning and his cause of death is not confirmed yet.

The tech world reacted with sadness over the passing of Tomlinson, who became a cult figure for his invention in 1971 of a program for ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor, that allowed people to send person-to-person messages to other computer users on other servers.

“It wasn’t an assignment at all, he was just fooling around; he was looking for something to do with ARPANET,” Raytheon spokeswoman Joyce Kuzman said of his creation of network email.

– He was an American Programmer.
– Before his invention, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer.
– He developed the first system to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the Arpanet.
– He used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since.

According to a 1998 profile in Forbes magazine, Tomlinson showed a colleague his invention and then, famously, said: “Don’t tell anyone! This isn’t what we’re supposed to be working on.”

At the time, few people had personal computers. The popularity of personal email wouldn’t take off until years later but has become an integral part of modern life.