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Brilio.net/en - A moment of silence for the man that has helped facilitate the modern day work world as we know it. Ray Tomlinson, passed this Sunday as was told by his employer to CNN. He was 74 years old. For his success, Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.
In 1971 Tomlinson invented direct email messages. Before him, messages could only be shared electronically on a very limited network. A graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT, Tomlinson was working for a Boston technology firm when he decided to figure out a way for people to send messages via computer. At the time, the idea was fairly novel, something thats hard to believe in todays world that relies so heavy on the original online messaging network. Back in the 1970s, computers were huge and heavy objects that were most definitely not a household staple.
"Computers were very expensive -- I think one we had here, for example, was something on the order of two or three hundred thousand dollars. That's 1970 dollars. They were a scarce resource," said Tomlinson in 2012.
Effectively Tomlinson used the @ sign to create a simpler location of the correspondents, as he thought the original mailbox protocol was too complex. The reason for the use of @? Pretty mundane, he told the NPR. IT was the only preposition on the keyboard.
Tomlinson told the Verge his invention had worked out pretty much as he'd imagined, though the scale was far greater.
"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," he said. "Everybody uses it in different ways, but they use it in a way they find works for them.
Gmail even paid a Twitter tribute to the inventor, tweeting "Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map.
(brl/tis)
