Internet Hall of Fame inductee dies at 74 after long career of solving complicated problems By JAMES R. HAGERTY March 10, 2016 5:30 a.m. ET Ray Tomlinson, who helped create email and change the way the world communicates, was in many ways old-fashioned.
Rather than trying to exploit his findings by founding a company, he remained an engineer at his employer—now known as Raytheon BBN Technologies, in Cambridge, Mass.—for nearly 49 years, until his death Saturday at age 74. His passion was for solving complicated problems, not marketing his inventions. He devised a program to allow musicians in different parts of the world to play together as if they were in the same room. One of his last projects involved software to help manage midair refueling of aircraft. But he also enjoyed simpler pursuits like baking bread. In his final years, he took up the hobby of breeding miniature Ouessant sheep at his home inLincoln, Mass. Mr. Tomlinson refused to carry a cellphone. “He didn’t think we should be tapped into technology at all times,” said Suzanne Schaffer, one of his two daughters who kept in touch with him largely by email. Mr. Tomlinson, a burly, bearded man of few words who reminded some people of a teddy bear, had appeared to be in good health and died suddenly. Friends and family members said the cause hadn’t been determined but may have involved a blood clot. AdvertisementMr. Tomlinson’s email breakthrough came in 1971, when computers were bulky stand-alone machines. It had long been possible for users of the same computer to send electronic messages to one another. But a precursor of the Internet called Arpanet, created by a U.S. Defense Department research agency, brought new possibilities. Others had proposed ways to send messages from one computer to another via Arpanet. Mr. Tomlinson found those methods cumbersome. So, as a side project, he quickly devised his own system, making his first tests on two Digital PDP-10 computers, standing side by side. He decided that the address should consist of the user’s name appended by the @ symbol to the identity of the host computer. “I used the @ sign to indicate that the user was ‘at’ some other host rather than being local,” he later wrote. Because Mr. Tomlinson didn’t think he was doing anything momentous, he didn’t bother to remember the content of his first successful test email. Email didn’t attain mass popularity until the mid-1990s, but Mr. Tomlinson had put some of the essential bricks in place. Was his contribution a stroke of genius? Dave Crocker, who was also involved in development work on Arpanet, said people in that crowd of elite programmers didn’t toss around terms like genius: “The ultimate compliment was to say someone was bright, or did something clever.” Mr. Tomlinson once told colleagues that he wished he had included in his email design a means of requiring senders’ identities to be authenticated, deterring spam and fraud. At that time, so few people used computers to send messages that the possibilities for abuse were hard to imagine. Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, N.Y., near Albany, and earned degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before being hired by BBN, then known as Bolt Beranek & Newman. Eventually, Mr. Tomlinson began winning awards for his work on email and was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. Though he appreciated the praise, “I don’t think he really felt he deserved the accolades,” said Brooke McKenzie, his other daughter. “He thought somebody else would have figured it out eventually.” His daughter Suzanne was surprised when a friend told her about her father’s email feat; he had never mentioned it. Mr. Tomlinson was among the highest-paid people at BBN, which employs about 650 people, colleagues say. Unlike many other computer and software pioneers, though, he never became a billionaire or a household name. “He wanted to get into the details of making things work,” said Paul Milazzo, a former colleague, “and the fact that he got paid for that was wonderful.” Harry Forsdick, who worked with Mr. Tomlinson for 25 years, said his colleague solved many software problems far tougher than the email protocol. They were so technical that outsiders never learned of them. He switched to part-time work at BBN a few years ago but kept up on the latest software languages and trends. “He was doing stuff that a lot of younger coders couldn’t handle,” said Derrick Kong, a colleague. Another BBN co-worker, Mary Trvalik, said: “He was more than happy to spend an hour, or two, or three, squinting at code, or arguing approaches on a whiteboard...He never stopped learning and had little patience if you thought you were done learning, too—no matter your age or your title.” His whistling skills were famous. Donald C. Allen, a former colleague, recalled watching Mr. Tomlinson in the mid-1970s go into a public phone booth and log into the office computer system by whistling a code down the phone line—in effect, mimicking a modem, a device used to send digital information over phone lines. Today’s teenagers and young adults tend to consider email passé and have switched to texts or social media tools designed for smartphones. Yet email remains essential for business and government—and even young people seeking jobs. Radicati Group, a Palo Alto, Calif., market-research firm, estimates that more than 205 billion email messages were sent last year and projects growth of 3% a year through 2019. Unlike the many people who can’t keep up with their bulging inboxes, Mr. Tomlinson was “pretty good at responding to email,” his daughter Suzanne said. Write to James R. Hagerty at [email protected]
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