Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) was an American[1][2][3][4] computer programmer who implemented the first
email program on the
ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971;[5][6][7][8] It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To achieve this, he used the
@ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been used in email addresses ever since.[9] The
Internet Hall of Fame in its account of his work commented "Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate."[10][11] He is credited with the invention of the
TCP three-way handshake [12] which underlies
HTTP and many other key
Internet protocols.
Early life and education
Tomlinson was born[13] in
Amsterdam, New York, but his family soon moved to the small, unincorporated village of
Vail Mills,
Broadalbin, New York.[14][15] His father Raymond Tomlinson worked in carpet mills and later worked in the grocery business. His mother Dorothy Tomlinson worked for a dry cleaner.[16] He attended Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York.[17] Later he attended
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in
Troy, New York where he participated in the co-op program with
IBM. He received a bachelor's degree in
electrical engineering from RPI in 1963.[18]
After graduating from RPI, he entered the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to continue his electrical engineering education. At MIT, Tomlinson worked in the Speech Communication Group and developed an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer as the subject of his thesis for the master's degree in electrical engineering, which he received in 1965.[14]
Career
In 1967, he joined the technology company of
Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies), where he helped develop the
TENEX operating system including the
ARPANETNetwork Control Program, implementations of
Telnet, and implementations on the self-replicating programs
Creeper and Reaper. He wrote a file transfer program called CPYNET to transfer files through the ARPANET.[19] Tomlinson was asked to change a program called
SNDMSG, which sent messages to other users of a
time-sharing computer, to run on TENEX.[20] He added code he took from CPYNET to SNDMSG so messages could be sent to users on other computers—the first email.[21]
The first email Tomlinson sent was a test. It was not preserved and Tomlinson describes it as insignificant, something like "
QWERTYUIOP." This is commonly misquoted as "The first e-mail was QWERTYUIOP."[22] Tomlinson later commented that these "test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them."[23]
At first, his email messaging system was not considered important. Its development was not a directive of his employer, with Tomlinson merely pursuing it "because it seemed like a neat idea."[14] When showing the system to a colleague, Tomlinson said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."[24]
Tomlinson said he preferred "email" over "e-mail," joking in a 2010 interview that "I'm simply trying to conserve the world's supply of hyphens" and that "the term has been in use long enough to drop the hyphen."[25]
In 2022, Email Day, an annual, national holiday was established in honor of Ray Tomlinson and his creation of email. April 23 (Tomlinson's birthday) was chosen.[29]