Passing of R. Tomlinson

[Rich Alderson]

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/