Father of Email and @ Symbol-Ray Tomlinson

Saurabh Didwania    Tech news

To most of us, electronic mail is a relatively recent phenomenon. But the first e-mail was sent 30 years ago, after a programmer came up with the "@" symbol format for e-mail addresses.

Can you remember the first e-mail message you ever sent? Unless you are a very recent convert to the internet, then probably not.

Ray Tomlinson can’t recall his first e-mail either but, it was certainly more significant. Mr Tomlinson has been called the father of e-mail because, back in 1971, he invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. Ray Tomlinson made it possible to send messages send messages from one computer to another in different locations; between universities, across continents, and oceans.

Tomlinson also gave birth to the “@” symbol, used to separate the name of the sender and the machine (or host) in an email address. The advantages of using @ symbol are manifold. It makes mail addresses much easier to remember than any scheme based on large strings of numbers.

At the time Mr Tomlinson was working for Boston-based Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which was helping to develop Arpanet, the forerunner of the modern internet. 

Change for the worse?

The internet, with its multimedia websites and sophisticated electronic commerce, is very different today to its incarnation 30 years ago.

We receive promotional, e-commerce emails, spam etc. which are most of the times uncalled for. This has been a pain to all email users. Junk mail filters come very handy to avoid them.

Popularity of plain text e-mail messages, show why the net has been such a huge success. They are convenient and leave a record that they have been sent; and now many of us can’t live without them.

But this scenario is changing and popularity of email is decreasing with the rise of social networking websites like twitter, facebook and many more. These sites are quicker, easier and incorporates number of extra facilities. We can expect a time when email will mostly be used for official purpose and people will use social networking to communicate more.

If you enjoyed this article please consider sharing it!