Ray Tomlinson: Father of Email

       The late Ray Tomlinson, who passed away in March 2016, worked at BBN Technologies for decades; my dad worked there in the late 1990s and through part of the 2000s and knew Ray during his 14 years there. Ray, however, joined BBN in 1967, working there for over 30 years.

       From both my dad's stories and the internet, Ray's most famous accomplishment is the invention of email, but that came after multiple other developments. While at BBN he developed the TENEX operating system, which included the ARPANET Network Control Program. The ARPANET, put simply, led to the development of the internet. Ray wrote a program that could transfer files via the ARPANET, called CPYNET, and was asked to change and improve a program called SNDMSG. SNDMSG operated on a time-sharing computer at BBN; it essentially acted as a bulletin board where users could send messages to each other on the computer. 

In Ray's version of fun, he went a bit further with development and added code from CPYNET to SNDMSG which allowed the message files to be transferred to and from separate computers. This is essentially the same way emails work to this day, but Ray did it for the first time in 1971. 

       Now is where we switch from Wikipedia information to what my father has told me about Ray over the years. Each user on the original SNDMSG computer had a username. Since everything was running on the same machine, that's all the specification each user needed. However, after Ray sent the first email--something insignificant, Ray doesn't remember what it was exactly--there needed to be another layer of specification for each user to their own separate computer. This is how Ray came to implement the @ sign and invent its modern use: the sign marks a location for an individual server that hosts that particular user. For example: username@usercomputer.com refers to the username that is hosted by "usercomputer."

       It really is a shame Ray doesn't remember his initial test emails; he had quite the sense of humor. After being asked if he could remember them, he responded that the "test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them." He also urged the small number of coworkers he let in on his project to not "tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on." What started as a fun test project turned into the foundation for modern professional communication, and even one of the major topics in this year's election debates! In all seriousness, founding a program that modern society could now not live without has left a great legacy for a long and successful career.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson
images:
http://marketingland.com/segmentation-personalization-automation-runs-data-126428

Any quotes were from the sites above, neither me nor my dad have a verbatim memory of what Ray had to say on the subject.