By Sharon Oliver
Contributing Writer
CAMBRIDGE – One of the most valuable facets of computer technology is networking. Namely, communications. Thanks to Cambridge engineer Ray Tomlinson’s fiddling with code, he invented the first email program which permits messages to be sent between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET, a communication network that would allow scientists and researchers to share each other’s computer facilities.
Precursor to internet
Shortly after earning his master’s degree in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the computer programmer began work at Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies) in 1967 as a principal engineer and helped develop ARPANET, the precursor to the internet. Tomlinson developed ARPANET’s first application for network email by combining the SNDMSG and CPYNET programs. He sent the first electronic message in 1971 which read: “QWERTYUIOP,” capitalized letters in the top row of the English keyboard.
Needing a marker to separate a user’s name from the host terminal, Tomlinson settled on @, one of the least utilized characters in ASCII. User@host remains the norm for email addresses to this day. After demonstrating the system to a colleague, Tomlinson told him to not tell anyone since this was not something they were supposed to be working on.
As the popularity of computers grew, starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, online services such as America Online (AOL) soon followed. By the 1990s, the public was fully enthralled with the World Wide Web and connecting with groups of people using email became common among those in the workplace and for personal use. Various social media platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) would eventually follow suit in making the @ character a standard tool for online interactions.
From one to four billion email accounts
By 1996, email was more commonly used than U.S. mail with almost four billion email accounts existing today and with the application of various fonts and graphics, users can create beautiful messages of their own in lieu of mailing a greeting card. Tomlinson said, “I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned. In particular, it’s not strictly a work tool or strictly a personal thing. Everybody uses it in different ways, but they use it in a way they find works for them.”
In an interview with NPR’s Guy Raz, Tomlinson said, “We were working on ways in which humans and computers could interact.” He started tinkering with the interaction between distant colleagues who didn’t answer their phones and eventually found a way to send messages from one computer to another, inventing what we now know as email.
Tomlinson added “The keyboards were about 10 feet apart. I could wheel my chair from one to the other and type a message on one, and then go to the other, and then see what I had tried to send.”
The revolutionary Ray Tomlinson was also a co-author of the standards RFC-561 (network mail headers) for message encoding in 1973, which defined fields such as “from,” “to,” and “date” that are still used in email addresses today.
A bevy of awards
In 2001, Tomlinson was honored with a Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and was inducted into the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame. In 2002, Discover Magazine awarded him its Innovation Award and in 2004, he earned the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Internet Award. He is ranked number four on the MIT list of top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT. Ironically, Tomlinson did not even own a mobile phone.
Ray Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. In 2016, he died from a heart attack in his home in Lincoln.
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