• by Jess Nelson , March 7, 2016

The creator of the @ symbol and inventor of modern email, Raymond "Ray" Tomlinson, passed away on Saturday. He was 74. 

Tributes for the American computer programmer have inundated social media and include some of the largest technology companies and executives, including Google’s Gmail team.

Tomlinson is credited with implementing the first email program on the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) system in 1971. Initially funded by the United States Department of Defense, ARPANET was a precursor to the modern Internet. 

Tomlinson introduced the “@” sign to allow messages to be targeted to individual users on specific machines, effectively creating the first email. Before Tomlinson’s addition, users could only write messages to others on the same, limited network.

Within two years email became a standard of the US Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the rest, as they say, is history.  

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born on April 23, 1941, in Amsterdam, New York.

Tomlinson had early exposure to the earliest computer technologies, and even participated in a program with IBM has an undergraduate student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He received his master’s degree in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965, having developed an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer as part of his master’s thesis.

In 1967 Tomlinson joined Bolt, Beranek and Newman, a Boston-based technology firm (now BBN Technologies) that was experimenting with ARPANET.  

“Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate," said the Internet Society, as part of Tomlinson’s induction as an inaugural member of the the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Tomlinson’s legacy lives on in the more than 4.4 billion email addresses registered globally today. Over 205 billion emails are sent per day according to Radicati Group -- a number that is expected to increase to over 246 billion emails per day by 2019.