Ray Tomlinson

Ray Tomlinson (1941 to 2016) was an American computer programmer who wrote the first email program able to send mail between users on different hosts of the ARPANET, in 1971. Educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined Bolt, Beranek and Newman in 1967, where he helped develop the TENEX operating system, the ARPANET Network Control Program and early Telnet implementations. He wrote CPYNET to move files between networked machines and then merged its code into SNDMSG, a local messaging program, so that messages could cross the network. To separate a user name from the machine that holds the mailbox he chose the @ sign, a convention still used in email addresses. He remained at BBN as a principal scientist and received the IEEE Internet Award in 2004 and induction into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.