Ray Tomlinson

Inventor of e-mail

• Born: April 23, 1941
• Birthplace: Amsterdam, New York
• Died: March 5, 2016
• Place of death: Lincoln, Massachusetts

Primary Company/Organization: ARPANET

Introduction

Ray Tomlinson achieved what became his principal career success in 1971, when he was working on the ARPANET system and devised the means for the world's first network e-mail system. His innovations led to the development of systems that would one day become the Internet.

Early Life

Raymond "Ray" Samuel Tomlinson was born October 2, 1941, in Amsterdam, New York; he was one of four boys. He spent his first four years in Worcestershire, and then the family moved to the small, unincorporated village of Vail Mills, New York. He attended Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York. In 1965 he received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York; while at Rensselaer, he participated in a program jointly coordinated by Rensselaer and IBM. He entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to continue his study of electrical engineering. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1965; Tomlinson developed an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer as part of his master's work. In 1967, he took a job with Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, which was involved in work related to ARPANET. There he helped develop the operating system TENEX and a file transfer protocol (FTP) called CPYNET.

Life's Work

In 1971, Tomlinson was a young engineer at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN, later Raytheon BBN Technologies) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had been working on network control protocol for TENEX and on file transfer protocols such as CPYNET and SNDMSG. The group with which he was working was given responsibility for finding applications for ARPANET, which was a network of four US computers linked together as part of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). The network featured data packet switching, thereby enabling (at least hypothetically) communications between one and many other computer systems. The concept of single-user-to-single-user communications had already been established, and Tomlinson could move from one machine to another to check whether a message he had sent had arrived correctly.

Since the 1960s, it had been possible to leave messages for other researchers using the same time-sharing computer. Unlike today's e-mail, the messages did not travel over a network but sat waiting for pickup on the computer. CPYNET allowed files to be transferred over the ARPANET. Tomlinson came across a request for comments (RFC) about a protocol for a messaging system using the network that struck him as far too complicated. He thought he could devise a better and simpler system.

Tomlinson had the idea of combining two existing programs, one for the single-user communication and one for distribution of files among ARPANET computers, to form an application that could send a message from one user to as many recipients as desired. A file on the recipient's machine was designated as the mailbox and was configured such that, although others could attach their material to the end of the existing file (as individual e-mail messages), they could neither access the file themselves nor change any of its contents apart from appending messages at the end. Tomlinson also had the idea of providing a unique identifier for multiple users on the same machine, but he needed something to separate the user's identification from the designation of the computer or network being used. Tomlinson studied the keyboard, wondering what character he could use to set off the username that would not be assumed to be part of the username. He chose the @ symbol because it is the only character on the keyboard that typically would not be part of an individual's name. The symbol would later be recognized in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent design collection as one of the key symbols representing the dawn of the computer age.

The first e-mails, in 1971, were tests of the system that Tomlinson sent to himself. In later years he could not recall the specific text he used for those very first e-mails ever sent, and assumed that it was simply something like the QWERTYUIOP keyboard string. After a few successful e-mails Tomlinson showed them to a colleague with the caveat that he not tell anyone else because the project was not part of their assignment. Eventually, however, the development attracted attention and eventually became one of the most recognizable applications of personal computing. In subsequent years Tomlinson was also involved in the formulation of e-mail standards and formats that continue to be used today through his coauthorship of RFC 561 in 1973, which defines name of sender, subject, and date fields. He was also involved with the enhancement of the file transfer protocol (FTP) system, which was used extensively until being replaced by simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) in 1982.

In 2000, Tomlinson received the George R. Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award from the American Computer Museum in recognition of his role in creating what became the Internet's most popular application. He was also inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. The question of whether Tomlinson or, indeed, anyone else, can be genuinely credited the inventor of e-mail has been much contested over the years, partly because a number of different projects were developed more or less contemporaneously to make e-mail possible; thus there is no single invention that defines e-mail so much as a collection of different protocols and systems that need to be combined in order to provide a recognizable experience and because the people involved were mostly known to one another and, as scientists rather than members of commercial operations, were willing to share ideas and knowledge. The subsequent cluster of activities located in California's computer and Internet cluster has at some stages followed a similar principle of mutual knowledge and competency sharing, but this has been significantly constrained as ideas and technologies have become embedded in specific companies that have aimed to protect what they believe is their intellectual property. It may be telling, however, that on The Boston Globe's 2011 "MIT 150," a list of what it described as 150 ideas that "have had a profound impact, in one way or another, on society, culture, politics, economics, transportation, health, science, and, oh yes, technology," Ray Tomlinson was ranked in fourth position.

Personal Life

Tomlinson enjoyed playing the piano and skiing. He was known to reminisce fondly about his collegial working life, when he made his greatest contributions, and to compare it unfavorably with later conditions, in which, although e-mail has become embedded in everyday life, the problems caused by spam, viruses, and other ill-intentioned innovations occasioned by good technological advancements have made many people's experience of technology problematic and unenjoyable.

Tomlinson was not a fan of the popular abbreviations or acronyms—such as LOL (for "laughing out loud") or AFAIK (for "as far as I know")—that became common in e-mails and other Internet communications or the dropping of formal opening salutations. In the early days of e-mail, after mistakenly copying an e-mail to a number of people who were unrelated to the project that was the subject of his e-mail message, Tomlinson sent the world's first spam message.

Later in life Tomlinson lived in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and owned a flock of miniature sheep, continuing to work for Raytheon in Cambridge. He died on March 5, 2016, at home at the age of seventy-four. He was survived by two daughters and two granddaughters.

Bibliography

Gillies, James, and Robert Cailliau. How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. Print.

Grimes, William. "Raymond Tomlinson, Who Put the @ Sign in Email, Is Dead at 74." New York Times, 7 Mar. 2016. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

Metz, Cade. "Meet the Man Who Put the ‘@’ in Your Email." Wired 30 July 2012. Web. 30 July 2012.

Pasternack, Alex. "Q+A: Ray Tomlinson Sent the First Email But His Inbox Is Still a Mess." Motherboard 20 Apr. 2010. Web. 30 July 2012.

Rawsthorn, Alice. "Why @ Is Held in Such High Esteem" New York Times 21 Mar. 2010. Web. 30 July 2012.

"Raymond Tomlinson." Internet Hall of Fame. Internet Soc., 2012. Web. 5 Apr. 2016.

Tomlinson, Ray. "The First Network Email: A History from Ray Tomlinson, the Inventor of Email." BBN Technologies. 13 Apr. 2010. Web. 30 July 2012.