Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of Email, Has Died

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/6/11168718/ray-tomlinson-dead-inventor-of-email-obituary

by jrbedard • 10 years ago

451 69 10 years ago

sethammons• 10 years ago

I work in the email space; thanks to this guy's invention, I can feed my family and have a solid financial life. It is amazing, the web of events, that shape our lives and the lives of others. RIP.

jacquesm2• 10 years ago

Even lots of people that are not directly active in the email space owe a part of their income to them, I find it a lot easier to imagine a world without smartphones or the web than I find it to imagine a world without email.

jamesrcole• 10 years ago

I think it's fair to say that email has had a big impact on the modern world.

I wonder how much the economy would break down, and have to change, if email suddenly went away?

And even if someone doesn't use it that much for personal communication, it's part of the underlying net infrastructure (think account-creation verification emails, password reset emails, bank statements, etc).

hackuser• 10 years ago

I work in the email space; thanks to this guy's invention, I can feed my family and have a solid financial life. It is amazing, the web of events, that shape our lives and the lives of others.

Consider what would have happened if email was a patented, proprietary tech (like Twitter, Facebook, etc.) rather than open.

cm2187• 10 years ago

The patent would have expired in the early 90s, before the internet even went mainstream...

dboreham• 10 years ago

Not to take anything away from his legacy, but isn't it a stretch to talk about the "invention" of email when we had telex, telegrams, heliography, scrolls of vellum carried by Roman messenger, and so on? What's left to invent?

jMyles• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why you are being downvoted because this is a very legitimate question. Fortunately it's not hard to see that email, and Tomlinson's contributions, were incredibly novel and have shaped a lot of "good parts" of the internet today.

Although obviously email was conceptually based on a very old notion of communication, embodied, as you point out, by many media that came before it, it had to solve a few small, specific problems inherent in moving messages from one system to another via a simple network protocol.

The use of the "user@domain" notion of identity seems mundane today, but in some important ways it was a huge breakthrough in the way that people thought about humans and the systems that need to work in order for them to be contacted.

dalke• 10 years ago

Could you elaborate on the the different notions of identity in, say, "chernenko@mcvax.su" vs. "mcvax!moskvax!kremvax!chernenko"?

Is it because the "@" form is more stand-alone while the "!" embeds with it a sense of what you think others might think is notable?

BellsOnSunday• 10 years ago

It's not a stretch at all, it's true that he invented that particular technology. Nobody said he invented the idea of passing a message from one place/person to another.

SonicSoul• 10 years ago

an invention does not need to be a completely new concept. A car was invented even after people were able to get from point A to point B via many means. Yet the car is still a big leap forward. Email seems obvious to you now, but at one point there were many obstacles to overcome to make it work.

rpathak1• 10 years ago

I just stumbled upon an site "http://www.inventorofemail.com/" which claims that Ray Tomlinson didn't invented email and it was an false claim.

"Fact #2: Ray Tomlinson “did not invent email”, he modified SNDMSG for exchanging text messages across computers - See more at: http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp#False-...

tatterdemalion• 10 years ago

That is the website of a person whose claim to have invented email has been widely dismissed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai

jcranmer• 10 years ago

RFCs 561, 680, 724, and 733 are the antecedents to RFC 822, which remains the basis of every nearly every email sent today. The dates on the earlier RFCs start from 1973, with RFC 733 (what I think was the first one actually agreed upon as a standard rather than a, well, request for comments) merely in 1977, all before the supposed "invention" in 1978. (RFC 822 itself was only 1982).

It's even hard to take the claim that Shiva's invention was the first to mimic inter-office mail seriously: all of the header fields are clearly mentioned in RFC 680.

In other words, the only way that you can even plausibly claim that Shiva invented email is to define email so narrowly that the only candidate is, in fact, his product. This should come across about as absurd as saying that FORTRAN can't be the first programming language because it didn't include an if statement.

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

What constitutes a novel invention is a matter of open dispute. I strongly recommend W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology, which addresses this, and other questions on, well, the nature of technology.

bane• 10 years ago

It's funny how core of a service the idea of email is...even pre-internet. Once companies started supplying dumb terminals connected to the corporate mainframe on every executive's desk, "electronic mail" quickly supplanted paper memos.

In my college OS class we had to build a *nix-like OS from the ground up and one of the required basic services we had to build was user-to-user messaging. After hacking out basic versions of "ls" and "cat" that was pretty much what we built next.

What was not so obvious, and much harder to do, and required something like the internet to solve was system-to-system mail transfer, which Tomlinson created. It turns out to be a strangely hard problem to do well. It's not hard to get it up and running, but the edge-cases and abuses have plagued us ever since. Maybe the problem is humans.

shmerl2• 10 years ago

We are mighty lucky that e-mail managed to become interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that. Instant messaging on the other hand failed miserably in this regard.

digi_owl• 10 years ago

I keep wondering if it is became of the era it was made in.

email was store and forward by necessity. IM was anything but.

userbinator• 10 years ago

There is IRC, which still has a reasonable number of users but isn't "global" in the way email is, SIP which could be used for IM but often wasn't, and Microsoft even attempted(but failed) to standardise MSN Messenger's protocol:

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-movva-msn-messenger-protoc...

shmerl2• 10 years ago

XMPP came closest to offering something serious enough. But most turned their backs on it and didn't propose anything better either.

patrickaljord2• 10 years ago

interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that

Not sure this holds true anymore in practice. Try to set up your own email server, your emails will probably get sent to spam by gmail, yahoo etc. Sure, it is technically possible, but it is time consuming and still risky to use it for business. At least you can still use your own domain and switch providers (google apps, outlook etc).

xorcist2• 10 years ago

Try to set up your own email server, your emails will probably get sent to spam by gmail, yahoo etc.

That problem is so overstated it's not even funny. Your email will get sent to spam if your IP adress is blacklisted, or if you send spam. It's actually gotten harder to get blacklisted over time, as people has gotten more tolerant towards semi-spam ("newsletters" and stuff) and people are generally more conservative in blacklisting whole networks these days.

Don't misbehave. Don't be a bad net citizen. Get your net and DNS in order, and the default Debian set up of postfix will do you just fine. I do it and most of my customers over the years have done it too. Some outsource their spam filtering, a few outsource their whole email, but most outside the small startup world still tend to keep their own mail server.

chei0aiV2• 10 years ago

The problem is well documented, here is one post from last year:

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/

ghaff3• 10 years ago

And messaging is arguably getting even worse, what with twitter DM, Facebook chat, Google whatever it's called, Slack, the list goes on...

It's frankly why we still use email for things that it's not really suited for

voltagex_2• 10 years ago

I think I'd like to call it The Great Messaging Fragmentation. It's been happening ever since I needed Pidgin (then Gaim) to keep in touch with my friends. Now there's a business reason to fragment even further, it's not going to get any better and I don't think there's a way to improve things. I'll be over here on IRC if you need me.

iMark• 10 years ago

Surely a black banner day, if ever there was one?

publicfig• 10 years ago

I've noticed that they've pretty much quit doing that, and as much as I agree with you, I think that's for the best. You never want it to turn into a competition as to whether or not someone's death was meaningful enough to merit it, and at the same time avoid just having a constant black bar in the title.

techdragon• 10 years ago

I think I'll try to honour this day by sending as little email as possible. As close to an "email moment of silence" as I can achieve I suppose.

AdamN• 10 years ago

Internet pioneers used to invent tools of communication like email, TCP/IP, DNS - now the pioneers are building walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter, Google :-/

maxerickson• 10 years ago

Facebook, Twitter and Google are the railroad tycoons (Twitter might only be aspiring), they came after the pioneers and built valuable infrastructure, capturing much of the value for themselves.

If you are going to torture an analogy, I say make it scream.

theologic• 10 years ago

Actually email is worth thinking about because if you didn't live it, you might not understand it's path or impact.

I came to age in technology at a strange age, being at a start-up in 1979 in high school, then getting my EE degree at the University of Washington in the late 80s, before joining IBM.

For those of you not around and the time, by the time I got to the UW, we had email and could send messages worldwide with BITNET. However, it was not critical and not used as much as you might think. Actually, USENET was a much bigger part of any geeks life. USENET had an amazing impact on everything we did in academia, and I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek from Europe saying that he was trying to do his own operating system. I was more hardware oriented, and I missed my chance to contribute to early Linux.

Where I first saw email becoming central to a culture is when I got to IBM. PROFS notes, or email, had a massive impact on the entire culture. The combination of calendar and email and the internal culture that had a terminal in every conference room would be familiar with most readers of Hacker news. You could have survived with what they offered in today's modern world.

The person responsible for the addition of email to PROFS was not influenced by what was happening in BITNET. The email in university was like a home brewed computer. I am not saying it wasn't important, but I'm saying that the adoption of email wasn't tied to this. However, the fact that IBM pushed email was as central as IBM creating a personal computer, only in this case it wasn't following Apple.

I saw an article on the founder of IBM PROFS email, and so I hunted him down on email while I was at IBM. I regret I cannot remember his name, but I wanted to say he was in research at Almaden, but this may be an human ECC error. However, I do remember that I wanted to know how obvious the creation of email was for everybody, and how much it was embraced. He stated at the time that most people thought that it would not be central to business life. Nobody saw the impact of email coming.

In the list of cognitive biases, we call it simply "Hindsight Bias."

It just goes to show how the obvious is not obvious until it happens.

My question, "What is happen today, that will be the next email that we are all missing?"

ilvnvtoomuch• 10 years ago

"..I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek from Europe saying that he was trying to do his own operating system..."

I can relate to a certain extent. I had the opportunity to interact with an early Google employee (Ex-professor) and I did't pursue or dive into that domain. I could have been more successful in a technical field. Now I do Program Management :)

ghaff3• 10 years ago

Similar experience. I sent a few emails on the ARPANET when at school in the late 70s and had some awareness of USENET at that time as well.

But I wasn't really immersed in email until I joined Data General in the mid-eighties where the use of email as part of CEO (which I think is fair to describe as a PROFS competitor) was pervasive. But it was pervasive only within our company. During this period, I used email within other systems like Compuserve but the BBS world, for example, didn't really have the concept of email--you had private posts.

Over time, various systems got connected to the, by then, Internet but it wasn't until the relatively late nineties that you could start reliably assuming that most people were on email.

TrevorJ• 10 years ago

Email, in my opinion, is still the best solution for a number of collaborative and communication tasks. It's deficient in any number of areas, but it does away with all the useless and distracting features of things like slack.

bpicolo• 10 years ago

Have lost a lot of great names in Computer Science lately. While sad, it's a great testament to how fast computers have evolved. Everything here that we have has evolved within a single generation. Incredible. The pace of human technological growth in the last 100 years has been explosive. It seems from my perspective now, it's slowed, but I'm now thinking that assumption is very wrong. I think in retrospect it's going to continue to explode, and it's only my view of what I'm using currently that makes it seem that way. Even a few slow years can be easily ignored in context of the leaps and bounds technology tends to evolve in: The transistor, the internet, the world as mobile...

The future is, and will always be, awesome potential.

cantrevealname2• 10 years ago

Thee very first email has been lost to time. As he said in an NPR interview from 2009, they were just random strings of text.

As usual, technical people easily miss the marketing value of sound bites. He should have invented a clever and catchy story about the first email.

Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that would a lie, forgetting the thousand "lies" that we are all complicit in (Santa Claus, tooth fairy, "your tie/haircut looks nice", "sorry, I don't have any change to give you").

EBay founder Omidyar said that eBay was invented to trade Pez dispensers, a story he's now admitted is completely false, but no one seems to be too worked up over that. Apparently Omidyar understands the difference between a lie (has an actual negative effect on someone) and marketing fluff (makes for an interesting story but is just trivia).

For such an influential person--in the sense that he had a huge impact on the world--Tomlinson is completely unknown. I'm guessing that his financial reward for inventing email was essentially nothing as well.

timthorn• 10 years ago

Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that would a lie.

Technical people, and people with integrity.

cantrevealname2• 10 years ago

So you're calling Pierre Omidyar a _______?

Did you tell your kids about Santa Claus? Did your parents tell you about Santa Claus? Does it follow that you or your parents lack integrity?

The world is not truth vs lies. There's more nuance. This illustrates why many brilliant technical people lacking marketing sense are relegated to obscurity.

biftek• 10 years ago

Some people also just do things because they love doing them. Not everything needs to be monetized and optimized for ROI.

umanwizard2• 10 years ago

I'd hate to live in a world where people only work on cool projects to get rich.

Sometimes comments on HN make me worried that we're heading that direction.

contingencies3• 10 years ago

Nobody here has considered the environmental impact of this invention. How much physical mail have we stopped lugging around the globe because of email?

Then social impact: by popularizing near-instantaneous global written interpersonal communication we have removed the walled garden of national language, culture and politics. Suddenly, a great force of inertia demands that every profession, every social and political issue must be viewed within its truly global context. Of course, we're not quite there yet but it's a clear trajectory.

Connecting the hive mind was really a red pill moment for humanity.

webkike• 10 years ago

Apparently the amount is about 30 billion pieces of mail, whatever that means[1]

[1] http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2013/10/bg284...

contingencies3• 10 years ago

That figure appears to be annually, and United States USPS 'first class' mail only: https://web.archive.org/web/20120114113728/http://about.usps...

webwanderings2• 10 years ago

Email is the only revolutionary communication technology there is. The next evolution is that of email lists. Anything else beyond these two, be that Twitter, Facebook, etc (they are nothing more than public email) are not evolutionary in true sense.

I'd only take away BCC feature from the email as a mistake, or useless. Email-lists should have been the true BCC.

bcook• 10 years ago

Only? IRC is pretty rockin'.

webwanderings2• 10 years ago

IRC/Live-chatting does not really solve any new problem which the Email has not solved already. If you look at live-chatting in the corporate and the personal world, you'll see that most often (and when things gets tough) people tend to either pick up a phone, or they'd send long-form email.

mattdeboard• 10 years ago

What's the criteria for the black band at the top of the page when a tech luminary passes away?

ericfrederich• 10 years ago

Too bad he never got to see it replaced with something like Google Wave

aws_ls• 10 years ago

Email is such a profound application on Internet. Kind of like air or water, and therefore its (nearly) free[1]. The walled garden social networks are like Coke (or sugary water) or polluted air in comparison.

Aren't there any poets here, who could pen a few couplets in his memory & respect? Just saying RIP to such a great Engineer, feels so not enough. Feel proud to call myself an Engineer, when such giants also call them one.

[1] - we have freedom via choice. If you use gmail/yahoo/etc you know you are doing a trade off. But its comforting to have choice.

elcct• 10 years ago

100% of people who invented email, died.

Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of Email, Has Died

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