Goodbye to the father of arroba and email

[-INTOX-™]

At age 74 passed away, victim of a heart attack, Raymond Tomlinson, the man who made the mail and communication a more electronic connection.

Considered the father of email and creator of the arroba (@), Raymond Tomlinson, died of a heart attack, but left the world a couple of developments that, to date, are the centerpiece of communication through the network especially for connecting via email of millions of people daily.

Tomlinson, who in 2012 was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, dedicated his life to research, being recognized for having designed the fundamental elements of electronic messages with the categories of "subject" (reason) and " for "(recipients). American engineer used the at sign to indicate that a message should go to a computer network, separating the recipient's name on the network symbol. So it was that sent the first email in 1971, after working in secret and interconnect, using the at sign as a symbol, multiple computers. At that time he not really gives importance to what he had discovered.

At that time he worked at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), involved in the development of the ARPA network for the Pentagon, which was to connect multiple computers over telephone lines to implement the processing power and data decentralize information storage.

He devoted himself to research through the development of SNDMSG program acronym send message (Send message) to the TENEX operating system, used by ARPANET, as well as file transfer program CPYNET. Unbeknownst to his bosses, Tomlinson worked in secret and in October 1971 managed to exchange messages among multiple computers, for which he used the at sign "@" as a symbol to separate the name of the email recipient of the receiving computer (server ).

That time, according to historians Internet, marked the birth of email, although at that time he did not give the importance that this would entail. The first of these electric post tests consisted of the letters making up the top line of the keyboard "QWERTYUIOP".

In the decades of work at BBN, where in 1987 he was appointed chief engineer, he contributed to the development of communication protocols or TCP-IP NVT. In the late seventies was the principal designer of Jericho, a computer internal use of BNN, and worked on video information servers and multimedia conferencing systems.

Among the many awards he received during his career are the George R. Stibitz (2000), the Webby Award (2001) and the prize of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Internet -IEEE- 2004, shared with Dave Crocker. On 17 June 2009 he shared with Martin Cooper, "father" of mobile telephony, the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.