19 May
2016
19 May
'16
4:01 p.m.
From: Murray McCullough
Sent: Thursday, May 19, 2016 1:17 PM
Sorry about being late: Raymond Tomlinson, email
inventor, sadly passed
on to the 'cyberworld' in March of this year. In this Age of the
Internet, we're communicating with his invention and sharing our hobby
throughoutthe world. Imagine 100 yrs. ago how we would have done this!
Pedantic note: Tomlinson did not invent e-mail.
What he did invent was a mechanism by means of which electronic mail
programs running on networked computers could communicate with each other.
In particular, he decided to use a character with a low frequency of
occurrence in text as the indicator that an address in the form of a user
identifier of some kind resided on a computer other than the local host.
His choice was, of course, the commercial-at (or commercial-a) character.
Rich
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computer Museum
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/