Ray Tomlinson sends a message
Nearly 50 years ago – sometime during the northern summer or autumn of 1971 – Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email. He didn’t invent electronic messaging, but he’s the person who came up with the [email protected] convention now used by billions of people every day: it was his idea to use the asperand, the @ symbol, as a separator.
Tomlinson was a computer scientist working for Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which started out specialising in acoustics – one of its first big jobs was in acoustics consulting for the new United Nations buildings in New York City.
To aid in its acoustics work, the company invested heavily in computer technology. When the US government, through the Department of Defence, launched its Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, formed in 1958 – in 1972 it...
