There are not too many people who can boast about having connected the world. Ray Tomlinson, the man largely credited as the inventor of email, passed away this past weekend at the age of 74. Unlike other giants of technology, Mr. Tomlinson’s name is not one that many people would instantly recognize. By all accounts he was a kind and humble man whose impact on the world is enormous. His work fundamentally changed the way we communicate for both work and pleasure and it continues to touch the lives of countless millions of people every day.
Tomlinson’s invention dates back to 1971 and the ARPANET system, which predates the Internet as most of us would recognize it today. As with most great inventions, it was the product of necessity. At the time, instant communication over any distance was limited to the telephone. With no voice mail, and only a limited number of answering machines available at the time, email solved a very real problem.
Perhaps most famously, Tomlinson devised the now-commonplace system of using the “@” symbol as a means of separating the names of senders and recipients from the names of their machines. He selected the “@” sign simply because it wasn’t commonly used in computing at the time and therefore would not lead to confusion.
His first attempts at sending a message from one computer to another were cumbersome, to say the least. In a 2009 interview with NPR he recalled, “The keyboards were about 10 feet apart. I could wheel my chair from one to the other and type a message on one, and then go to the other, and then see what I had tried to send.”
With only a tiny community of people having access to (what were very expensive) computers in the 1970s, Tomlinson’s invention was definitely ahead of its time. It took another two decades before it became commonplace in offices and homes around the world. Despite this, Tomlinson’s vision for the technology was clear from the very beginning. He would later tell journalists at The Verge, “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. Everybody uses it in different ways, but they use it in a way they find works for them.”
Today, people use email to navigate through their daily lives. Most of us cannot imagine a life without email. For those of us old enough to remember a time before email became a ubiquitous means of communication, it’s hard to even remember how we actually managed to get anything done without it.
The iContact business is built on the foundations laid by Ray Tomlinson, and we are proud to help businesses and organizations of all shapes and sizes realize their potential and opportunities through the invention he shared with the world back in 1971.
We have a lot to thank Ray Tomlinson for.
— Geoffrey Alexander, President