Passing of R. Tomlinson

Eric Christopherson echristopherson at gmail.com
Thu May 19 19:41:33 CDT 2016


On Thu, May 19, 2016, Rich Alderson wrote:
> 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.

OH! He invented the at sign!

    ;)

-- 
        Eric Christopherson


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