Ray Tomlinson, father of electronic mail – Photo by Andreu Veà, WiWiW.org
Ray Tomlinson, officially recognized as the inventor of electronic mail (e-mail,) has died from a heart attack.
In 1971, Tomlinson’s invention was the introduction of direct email messages. Prior to that, electronic messages could only be shared across a very limited network.
Ray Tomlinson introduced the use of the @ (“at”) symbol to separate local from wide area networks, thus specifying a delivery address, to be used in the e-mail syntax. The previous system was complex and inefficient.
The first test email Ray Tomlinson sent was not preserved. Tomlinson describes it as insignificant, something like “QWERTYUIOP”.
Although that was not exactly the test message, the domain QWERTYUIOP.com is owned by no other than domain investor Frank Schilling.
About 100 billion emails are being sent on a daily basis, although a lot of it is considered to be spam.
