Raymond Tomlinson, Who Put the @ Sign in Email, Is Dead at 74
By WILLIAM GRIMES

Raymond Tomlinson, the computer programmer who in 1971 invented email as it is known today, and in the process transformed the “at” sign — @ — from a sparely used price symbol to a permanent fixture in the lives of millions of computer users around the world, died on Saturday at his home in Lincoln, Mass. He was 74.

His daughter Brooke Tomlinson McKenzie confirmed the death but said that the cause had not been determined.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s Mr. Tomlinson was working at a research and development company, Bolt, Beranek & Newman, on projects for the Arpanet, a forerunner of the Internet that was created for the Defense Department. At the time, the company had developed a messaging program, Sndmsg, that allowed multiple users of a time-share computer to send messages to one another. But it was a closed system, limited to users of a single computer.

Mr. Tomlinson, filching code from a file-transfer program he had created called Cypnet, modified Sndmsg so that messages could be sent from one host computer to another throughout the Arpanet system. To do this, he needed a symbol to separate a user name from a destination address. He settled on the plump little @ sign because it did not appear in user names and did not have any meaning in the Tenex paging program used on time-sharing computers.

In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art included the symbol in its architecture and design collection, calling it “a defining symbol of the computer age.”

The Internet Society in Geneva, on inducting him into the newly created Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, honored Mr. Tomlinson for “having brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate.”

In accepting the honor, Mr. Tomlinson said: “I’m often asked, did I know what I was doing? And the answer is, yes, I knew exactly what I was doing. I just had no notion whatsoever of what the ultimate impact would be. What I was doing was providing a way for people to communicate with other people.”

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson, known as Ray, was born on April 23, 1941, in Amsterdam, N.Y., northwest of Albany, and grew up in nearby Vail Mills. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, also nearby, in Troy, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering in 1964.

Mr. Tomlinson pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he worked in the Speech Communications Group. He received a master’s degree in 1965 after developing an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer.

He joined Bolt, Beranek & Newman (later renamed BBN Technologies and now part of Raytheon) while working toward a doctorate, though he was not making much progress. Within a few years the company began working on the Arpanet, developing the first components of what would become the Internet.

He helped develop the Tenex operating system — so called because its paging software extended the memory capacity of the PDP-10 computer — and worked on the Arpanet Network Control System, which provided connectors and flow control between processes running on different Arpanet host computers. On the side, he began tinkering with the Sndmsg program.

Mr. Tomlinson was careful to note that he was the first to send a “network email,” rather than an email pure and simple. Messages had been sent before within single computers, and in July 1971 the programmer Dick Watson of the research and development company SRI (formerly Stanford Research Institute and now SRI International) had proposed a form of email in which messages would be sent to numbered mailboxes rather than individual users. It was never put in place.

When asked, on the BBN website, why he invented email, Mr. Tomlinson said: “Mostly because it seemed like a neat idea. There was no directive to ‘go forth and invent email.’ ”

Unfortunately for historians, there is no Internet counterpart to the first telephone communication, Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here — I want to see you.” Mr. Tomlinson tried his messaging system out for the first time in late 1971, using two DEC-10 computers, made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, standing side by side. They communicated through the Arpanet system.

“I would type the message in on one machine, go to the other machine and examine my mailbox there to see if it had arrived,” Mr. Tomlinson told The New York Times in 2001. “When it finally worked reliably, I sent a message from the development machine (named BBN-TenexB) to all the users in my group on the production machine (BBN-TenexA) describing what I had done, including the @ convention for separating the user name from the host name.”

The content of the ur-emails remains unknown. “The test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them,” Mr. Tomlinson told the BBN website.

Mr. Tomlinson’s messaging system was the first “killer app,” David Walden wrote in “A Culture of Innovation: Insider Accounts of Computing and Life at BBN” (2011).

“When it burst onto the scene in 1971,” Mr. Walden added, “it gave the first tangible indication of how far the Internet might go in becoming the ubiquitous anyone-anywhere-to-anyone-anywhere communication system it has become.”

Mr. Tomlinson went on to play an important role in developing the first email standards, including the now-familiar name, date and subject headers atop every email message.

He later worked on a wide variety of complex problems at BBN, notably the “three-way handshake” that lets a computer set up the rules for communicating with a foreign device, such as a modem or printer, and an early workstation system called Jericho.

The “at” sign, meanwhile, assumed a life of its own. It was known as the “commercial a” when it appeared on the American Underwood typewriter in 1884 and was understood to mean “at” or “at the rate of,” as in the ledger notation “one doz. widgets@34 cents ea.”

Once introduced into email, it took on a personality, and a variety of pet names. In French and Italian, it is called a snail. Israelis know it as a strudel, and Finns, having decided that it resembles a curled-up cat, call it miukumauku, or “the meow sign.”

In 1996, for the first time in the United States, more electronic mail was being sent than postal mail. According to a report by the Radicati Group on global email use, last year over two billion emails were sent every day from 4.35 billion registered email accounts.

Mr. Tomlinson’s first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter Brooke, he is survived by another daughter, Suzanne Tomlinson Schaffer; two brothers, David and Gary; his partner, Karen Seo; and two granddaughters.

Mr. Tomlinson, who worked for Raytheon at his death, said in a 2012 interview with the web magazine The Verge that he was not particularly surprised at the way his invention evolved.

“I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned,” he said.

創＠分隔符號 電郵教父湯林森辭世

發明電子郵件的湯林森（Raymond Tomlinson）6日因心臟病發去世，享壽74歲。他苦思讓民眾用電腦便可直接傳送訊息的方法，1971年發明電郵，並選擇以「@」作為電郵地址分隔符號，因這項發明2012年入選網路名人堂。湯林森早前數度受訪時透露，已想不起來第一封電郵內容寫了什麼，選擇@只是因為它是電腦鍵盤上很少用到的符號。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/technology/raymond-tomlinson-email-obituary.html

2016-03-07．聯合晚報．A6．國際焦點．美聯社