Posted on 03/06/2016 5:44:12 PM PST by John W
Raymond Tomlinson, the inventor of modern email and selector of the "@" symbol, has died. He was 74.
Raytheon Co., his employer, on Sunday 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.
Here are five things to know about Tomlinson's invention:
1. The first email was sent on the ARPANET system.
(Excerpt) Read more at pennlive.com ...
I thought Al Gore invented email too.
@home.withgod.com...
RIP.
Didn’t he invent the polar bear?
@? !
5. Tomlinson didn't live only for email. Born in Amsterdam, New York, he lived in recent years in Lincoln, Massachusetts where he raised miniature sheep. Attempts to contact his family were unsuccessful.
Messages probably got caught in their spam filter...
Full disclosure: I once met the guy who invented the *PING* command. He, too, has gone on to the great big keyboard in the sky.
Sounds, from the article, like a really decent guy.
It was in the early 1990s when I sent my first email message. That would have been some 20 years after it was invented. I bought my first home computer that year (think it was 1992) and it was a big deal. It had Windows 3.1 which was brand new at the time so you still had to get to a DOS prompt to run most programs. People from around the neighborhood came over the house to see it. I played Wolfenstein 3-D and Leisure Suit Larry. Later I figured out how to work a spreadsheet in Quattro Pro. Or was it Multiplan. I don’t remember now which came first. But definitely Word Perfect 5.1.
RIP.
A Pioneer, indeed.
Nully invented .calm....
Where are his accolades?
I went to buy a computer in 1986 because I needed something to write resumes for my husband who was in a job search. The salesman (who was about 19) looked down his nose at me when I complained about the quality of the printing and declared that I “wasn’t ready for a computer”. So, I bought a used Selectric typewriter. Next, I tried again in 1991. I took an Apple class. When I went to buy a system, the whole thing came to about $4000, which was too pricey for me, so I bought a word processor with it’s own print capability and two, or 3, font changes. It saved letters, etc. on discs. In 1996, I enrolled in a local college to finish a long neglected degree and purchased my first computer — Win 3.1. My daughter and son-in-law taught me how to use it over the Thanksgiving Holiday, and I haven’t looked back.
Remember Symphony? We still have and use that software on one of our really, really OLD computers. Great program.
@home.withgod.com...
It would probably have been a "bang path" address at that time.
I bought a Dell 486SX-25 at about the same time. Came with a whopping 4 megs of ram and I think 512k on board video memory. It also came with win 3.1 and as I recall, you had to go to a dos prompt to launch WP 5.1.
Oh, and a blazing fast 14.4K modem card built in.
We’ve come a long way since then.
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