E-mail inventor Ray Tomlinson passes away

Internet pioneer and e-mail inventor Raymond Tomlinson passed away in Washington, United States. He was 74 years old.
Tomlinson invented direct electronic messages between users on different machines on a certain network in 1971.
Key pioneering inventions

• First email system: He implemented it on the ARPANET system which is considered as the precursor to the Internet. Prior to this system, users could only write messages to others using the same computer.
• @ sign: To send electronic messages on different machines on a certain network successfully he had used @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine. Since then this separation scheme is used in email addresses and has become standard.

About Ray Tomlinson

• Born as Raymond Samuel Tomlinson on April 23, 1941 in Amsterdam, New York, US.
• He had graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in electrical engineering.
• In 1967, he had joined the technology company of Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies).
• In this company he had helped to develop the TENEX operating system including ARPANET Network Control Program and TELNET implementations.
• Awards and Honours: IEEE Internet Award (2004), George R. Stibitz Computer Pioneer Award (2000).
• He was inducted in the Internet Hall of Fame (IHF) in 2012 by the Internet Society. IHF has mentioned that his email program has brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changed the way people communicate.

ARPANET system: Abbreviated as Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET). It was an early packet switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol). Both of these technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet.

Month: Current Affairs - March, 2016