The father of email dies at 74

(Baonghean.vn) - CNN reported that Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email and whose name was engraved on the Internet Wall of Fame in 2012, passed away on March 6 at the age of 74.

Ray Tomlinson in a 2009 photo.

A graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and MIT, Tomlinson invented email in 1971. Before that, electronic messages were shared only over a very limited network.

ARPANET — the precursor to the Internet — was new at the time, Tomlinson recalls, and the idea of ​​sending messages between computers seemed novel.

Sharing with The Verge in 2012, Tomlinson said that the email interface at that time was too complicated. Therefore, he thought of a simple plan, which was to assign the "@" symbol - to represent the email domain name.

The reason for choosing "@" was simple, Tomlinson told NPR: "Not only is it an underused symbol, but it's also understood as a preposition on the keyboard."

A few decades later, email was still something of a novelty. It wasn't until the rise of personal computers, followed by online services in the 1980s and early 1990s—like America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe—that email became commonplace, used by millions.

In an age of rapidly growing media such as social media and smartphones, email has become less important in everyday communication, but it is still very popular.

According to a study by the Radicati Group, there were 3.9 billion email accounts in 2013 with over 100 billion emails sent and received every day and this number continues to increase over time.

"I see email being used as widely as I envision it," Tomlinson told The Verge. "It's not necessarily a work tool or a personal asset. Everyone uses email in different ways that they see as a product."

Thanh Hien

(According to CNN)