Ray Tomlinson obituary
Ray Tomlinson, who has died aged 74, put the @ sign in your email address, and thus invented the name@host convention now used by billions of people every day. His logical but entirely personal choice of the asperand made a little used keyboard character into what the Museum of Modern Art in New York called a "defining symbol of the computer age".
At the time - the early 1970s - Tomlinson's idea did not seem much of a big deal. He was a computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, one of the US government contractors developing the Arpanet computer network, a precursor of the internet. Users of BBN's PDP-10 minicomputers, such as BBN-TenexA, could send each other messages, but only to people who were using the same physical computer. They couldn't email colleagues who were logged on to the identical computer right next to it, say BBN-TenexB. It would obviously be useful if they could and Tomlinson introduced that capability in 1971, as a side project to his real job, which was extending the minicomputer's operating system.
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