Raymond Tomlinson.
Raymond Tomlinson ’63, a Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame member who is the inventor of modern email, died March 5.
Tomlinson invented email as an engineer for Bolt Beranek and Newman in 1971. While working on a contract to create ARPANET, a communication network that would allow scientists and researchers to share each other’s computer facilities, he hit on the idea to merge an intra-machine message program with another program developed for transferring files among ARPANET computers. Unforeseen at the beginning of ARPANET, Tomlinson’s creation of email became the future Internet’s most popular application.
“Raymond Tomlinson fundamentally changed the way that the world communicates,” said President Jackson. “With a stroke of a key, we can now speak directly and instantaneously to friends, family, colleagues and business partners across borders, states, countries and oceans. He invented email, and he was the first to use the @ symbol to communicate—a symbol that is foundational for nearly all of the social networking platforms we use today. We now rely on his invention to communicate with our families and our colleagues, to coordinate informal meetings and summits of world leaders, to forge multibillion-dollar deals and to ratify multinational agreements to reduce nuclear arsenals and combat climate change. The Rensselaer community is saddened by the loss of Raymond Tomlinson, and we are grateful for the incredible contributions that he made to the world.”
Raymond Tomlinson fundamentally changed the way that the world communicates. We now rely on his invention to communicate with our families and our colleagues, to coordinate informal meetings and summits of world leaders, to forge multibillion-dollar deals and to ratify multinational agreements to reduce nuclear arsenals and combat climate change. The Rensselaer community is saddened by the loss of Raymond Tomlinson, and we are grateful for the incredible contributions that he made to the world.”—President Jackson
Over the course of his career, Tomlinson received many awards and honors. In 2001, he was inducted into the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame. That same year he received a Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences for lifetime achievement. In 2002, Discover Magazine awarded him its Innovation Award. In 2011 he was listed fourth in the MIT 150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT. And, in 2012, Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.
“Most people today don’t realize that email was invented long before the Web browser, the personal computer, Google, the cell phone, and most of the other computing innovations we take so much for granted today,” said James Hendler, Tetherless World Professor of Computer, Web, and Cognitive Sciences. “When Ray Tomlinson came up with the idea that people could communicate using their machines, there were less than 20 computers connected in what was then the world’s largest computer network. The fact that he designed the system in such a way that it was able to scale to the literally billions of users on today’s Internet demonstrates what a visionary he was. He’s a perfect example of how Rensselaer students learn to think big and take on the world-changing challenges that underlie the immediate problems they are asked to explore.”