He died the father of the email and at symbol – ElTiempo.com

Raymond Tomlinson, considered the father of the email and the creator of the at sign (@) for use in Internet addresses, died Saturday at age 74, apparently due to a heart attack.

the news was announced by one of the pioneers of the Internet, Vinton Gray Cerf, who reported on his Twitter account of the death of Tomlinson without saying where it happened or why, but it was later confirmed by media specializing in technology .

Tomlinson, who in 2012 was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, a virtual museum to recognize figures with outstanding contributions in this field, is also recognized for having designed the fundamental elements of the electronic messages with the categories of “subject” (reason) and “for” (recipients).

the American engineer was the first to use the symbol of the at sign to indicate that a message should go to a computer network, separating the recipient’s name on the network. Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, in the state of New York, in 1941, and after graduating in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic (1963) Institute expanded its training in this discipline at the Institute of Technology of Massachusetts (MIT).

in 1967 started working at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), involved in the development of the ARPA network for the Pentagon, which was to interconnect several computers via telephone lines to implement the processing power and data decentralize storage information.

His research was the development of SNDMSG program acronym send message (send message) to the TENEX operating system, used by ARPANET, and the program file transfer CPYNET.

Without the knowledge of 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 recipient’s email the receiving computer (server).

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

In the 1990s worked in the Logistics Anchor Desk program (LAD) for the US Army and the Advanced Logistics Project (ALP), in addition to improving security in e-commerce software company CyberTrust.

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 June 17, 2009 shared with Martin Cooper, “father” of mobile telephony, the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research.

EFE