Ray Tomlinson

About Ray Tomlinson

Who is it?: Inventor of the First Email System
Birth Day: April 23, 1941
Birth Place: Amsterdam, New York, U.S., United States
Died On: March 5, 2016(2016-03-05) (aged 74)\nLincoln, Massachusetts, U.S.
Birth Sign: Taurus
Alma mater: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Occupation: Computer programmer, inventor, electrical engineer
Known for: Invented the first email system

Ray Tomlinson Net Worth

Ray Tomlinson was born on April 23, 1941 in Amsterdam, New York, U.S., United States, is Inventor of the First Email System. Raymond Tomlinson was an American computer programmer who was for long credited as the inventor of the email. He implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system in the early 1970s and was internationally known for inventing the email. However, following his death in early 2016, a controversy erupted over who actually invented the email with entrepreneur and innovator VA Shiva Ayyadurai claiming to have actually created it. But it is well accepted that it was Tomlinson who innovated the usage of the “@” sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, an idea which was later adapted for forming email addresses. Born and raised in New York, he attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy and graduated with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He then proceeded to further his education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for his master’s degree. He then took up a job with Bolt Beranek and Newman (now Raytheon BBN Technologies) where he played a major role in the development of the TENEX operating system including ARPANET Network Control Program and TELNET implementations. It was during his stint there that he created a program to send messages to other users of a time-sharing computer.
Ray Tomlinson is a member of Inventors & Discoverers

💰 Net worth: Under Review

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Biography/Timeline

1963

Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York, but his family soon moved to the small, unincorporated village of Vail Mills, Broadalbin, New York. He attended Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York. Later he attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York where he participated in the co-op program with IBM. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from RPI in 1963.

1965

After graduating from RPI, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to continue his electrical engineering education. At MIT, Tomlinson worked in the Speech Communication Group and developed an analog-digital Hybrid speech synthesizer as the subject of his thesis for the master's degree in electrical engineering, which he received in 1965.

1967

In 1967 he joined the Technology company of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies), where he helped develop the TENEX operating system including the ARPANET Network Control Program, implementations of Telnet, and implementations on the self-replicating programs Creeper and Reaper. He wrote a file transfer program called CPYNET to transfer files through the ARPANET. Tomlinson was asked to change a program called SNDMSG, which sent messages to other users of a time-sharing computer, to run on TENEX. He added code he took from CPYNET to SNDMSG so messages could be sent to users on other computers—the first email.

2010

Tomlinson said he preferred "email" over "e-mail", joking in a 2010 interview that "I'm simply trying to conserve the world's supply of hyphens" and that "the term has been in use long enough to drop the hyphen".

2016

Tomlinson died at his home in Lincoln, Massachusetts, on March 5, 2016, from a heart attack. He was 74 years old.