Ray Tomlinson

Ray Tomlinson
Andreu Veà, WiWiW.org · CC BY-SA 3.0 · source
Name	Ray Tomlinson
Birth date	1941-04-23
Birth place	Amsterdam, New York
Death date	2016-03-05
Death place	Cambridge, Massachusetts
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Occupation	Computer engineer
Known for	First networked email

Ray Tomlinson was an American computer engineer credited with implementing the first networked electronic mail system on the ARPANET in 1971. His work connected software from Bolt, Beranek and Newman to the early packet-switching ARPANET infrastructure and introduced the now-ubiquitous at sign (@) as a separator between user and host. Tomlinson's contributions influenced later developments at institutions and companies such as BBN Technologies, MIT, SRI International, Xerox PARC, and Microsoft where email and networking standards evolved.

Early life and education

Born in Amsterdam, New York and raised in the Mohawk Valley, Tomlinson obtained a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During his time at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute he engaged with faculty and projects related to early IBM systems and laboratory computing, and at MIT he encountered researchers involved with Project MAC, J.C.R. Licklider, and the nascent community that spawned RFC development and the Internet Engineering Task Force antecedents.

Career and contributions

Tomlinson joined Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) in the mid-1960s, working alongside engineers contributing to the ARPANET contract awarded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. At BBN Technologies he worked with teams building interface message processors and software for TENEX, Multics, and research environments connected to Stanford Research Institute and Harvard University. His software development intersected with systems created by people at BBN, RAND Corporation, Bell Labs, Massachusetts General Hospital, and other participants in early packet-switching research.

Development of networked email

In 1971 Tomlinson adapted existing local mail programs and the CPYNET file-transfer concept to send messages between users on different hosts connected via ARPANET interface message processors. He selected the at sign (@) to disambiguate a user name from a host name, a choice that interoperated with naming schemes used by BBN, Stanford Research Institute, UCLA, University of California, Berkeley, and MIT. His implementation built on the TENEX operating system and drew on work by contemporaries such as Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (colleagues), Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf on protocols and RFC 561-era practices, presaging the later development of SMTP and Internet Message Format. The initial messages he sent were simple test strings transmitted among developers at BBN, Lincoln Laboratory, ARPA, and other research sites participating in early network topology experiments.

Later work and recognition

Following his breakthrough, Tomlinson continued software and systems work at BBN Technologies, contributing to commercial and government computer networking projects that linked to research at Xerox PARC, Apple Computer, Microsoft Research, and University of California, Los Angeles. Over the decades his role was recognized by awards and honors from organizations including the Internet Society, the Computer History Museum, the IEEE, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology-affiliated communities; he received lifetime achievement acknowledgments alongside figures such as Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, and Paul Baran. His influence was noted in retrospectives at events hosted by SIGCOMM, ACM, USENIX, and IETF meetings.

Personal life and legacy

Tomlinson lived in the Boston area near Cambridge, Massachusetts and was remembered by colleagues at BBN, MIT, and the wider Internet research community. His introduction of the at sign in addressing, and his early networked mail program, seeded conventions used by services from Comcast to Google, Yahoo!, AOL, Hotmail, ProtonMail, and enterprise systems by IBM and Microsoft Exchange. His legacy appears in standards and histories maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society, and museums such as the Computer History Museum and Smithsonian Institution exhibits on computing. He died in March 2016, leaving a foundational contribution to digital communication used by millions worldwide.

Category:American computer engineers Category:People associated with ARPANET Category:Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni Category:Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni