Ray Tomlinson, father of email, dead at 74 - CNET

Ray Tomlinson, inventor of the contemporary email system, has died of an apparent heart attack at the age 74. His passing was confirmed by Mike Doble, director of corporate PR at Tomlinson's employer Raytheon. In a statement to CNET Doble described Tomlinson as a "true technology pioneer".

Back in 1971, while working for Boston-based tech firm BBN, Tomlinson developed a system for sending electronic messages between computers on different host networks. Tomlinson was working on ARPANET, a precursor to the mode inteet. While it seems strange in the mode networked world, previous messaging systems allowed you to share messages for other users on the same computer.

Perhaps more famously, it was Tomlinson's system that introduced the "@" symbol into email lexicon. Speaking to CNET back in 2002, Tomlinson said he had just been looking for a way "of separating the user and the computer name".

"In English the @ sign is obvious, in other languages it isn't," he said. "But being the only preposition on the English keyboard, it just made sense."