Passing of R. Tomlinson

[Chuck Guzis]

On 05/19/2016 04:01 PM, Rich Alderson wrote:

> 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.

As opposed to,say, the "bang" format address (UUCP/usenet) or the
double-colon (DECnet) or CSNET (percent sign)--and there were probably a
host of company-internal varieties, particularly on older 6-bit machines
without a commercial "at" in their character set.

Fun was when email was shuttled through a couple of different systems...

--Chuck