Email inventor Ray Tomlinson passes away at age 74

Ray Tomlinson, one of the pioneers of the Internet, passed away Saturday morning due to a heart attack at the age of 74. As an electrical engineering at R&D company Bolt, Beranek and Newman, he become the developer of a network application responsible of sending and receiving messages among users via various networks.

Tomlinson is credited for sending the first email across a network that makes use of the “@” sign to include a separation between a username and a user’s host machine, without a domain (ex. “.com”). Email addresses like Cerf@ISI or unj@berkley were usual during the first years of this form of electronic communication.

He was also responsible for the development of email standards people still used up to this day, such as From and Subject.

Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet” for co-inventing the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), confirmed the news via Twitter.

Very sad news: Ray Tomlinson has passed away. https://t.co/Ghi8B2m3IX

— vinton g cerf (@vgcerf) March 5, 2016

Video of his induction into the Internet Hall of Fame

[Sources]: The Sydney Morning Herald: Email pioneer Ray Tomlinson dead at 74; @vgcerf (Twitter): Very sad news: Ray Tomlinson has passed away.