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c0lo [soylentnews.org] writes:

Sydney Morning Herald reports [smh.com.au] on the death of Ray Tomlinson:

Raymond Tomlinson, the godfather of email, died Saturday morning of a suspected heart attack. He was 74.

Tomlinson, who was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012, is best known for rescuing the @ symbol from obscurity and, in the process, shaping the way we talk about being online.

He was also a key driver in the development of standards for the "From", "Subject", and date fields found in email messages today.

The Internet Hall of fame entry on Raymond Tomlinson [internethalloffame.org] reads:

In 1967, he joined the legendary research and development company Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN Technologies). At BBN, he helped develop the TENEX operating system, including implementations of the ARPANET and TELNET protocols. In 1971, he developed ARPANET's first application for network email by combining the SNDMSG and CPYNET programs, allowing messages to be sent to users on other computers. He chose the @ sign to separate local from global emails in the mailing address. Person to person network email was born and user@host became the standard for email addresses, as it remains today.

Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate, including the way businesses, from huge corporations to tiny mom-and-pop shops, operate and the way millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans. Today, tens of millions of email-enabled devices are in use every day. Email remains the most popular application, with over a billion and a half users spanning the globe and communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space.

Vin Cerf [twitter.com] and gmail team [twitter.com] were among the first to pay tribute on Twitter.

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