Why is Ray Tomlinson a remarkable figure?

         The history of communication would not have been what it is today, if not for Ray Tomlinson. As many of you would know, he implemented the first email program in the world, on the ARPANET system.

          In 1967, he joined the Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) Technologies where he made his email breakthrough. The invention allowed people to send messages from one computer to another.

           At BBN Technologies, Tomlinson was working on a local electronic message program titled SNDMSG, which the ARPANET programmers were using on the network computers. This technology enabled sending emails between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Till then, mails could be sent only to others who used the same computer.

            The first email sent was not preserved, and is known to be something like ‘QWERTYUIOP’.

            The ‘@’ sign on the Internet map is also contribution made by Tomlinson. The sign was used to separate the username from the name of their machine.