Ray Tomlinson, @ 74; pioneer of e-mail

Imagine for a moment that you were sitting at a keyboard in 1971, about to send the world's first e-mail from one computer to another. You had to determine how to designate an electronic "address," even though your message would travel to a computer on a desk only about 15 feet away.

Ray Tomlinson, fresh from graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, faced that decision early in his career at his first and only employer, the high-tech research company Bolt, Beranek and Newman. Before that day in 1971, people had sent electronic messages to each other while sharing the same computer, but no one had done what he was about to do — send a message between two separate machines.

To designate an address, he settled on the @ key — a flick of the left ring finger for a 10-finger typist. "I was mostly looking for a symbol that wasn't used much," he told Smithsonian magazine in 2012. "And there weren't a lot of options — an exclamation point or a comma. I could have used an equal sign, but that wouldn't have made much sense."

Besides, he once told NPR, the @ symbol was "the only preposition on the keyboard," and his fidelity to proper grammar created an enduring part of the billions of e-mails sent since.

Mr. Tomlinson, who at 74 was still a principal engineer at what is now called Raytheon BBN Technologies, collapsed in his Lincoln home early Saturday while he and his longtime companion were seeking medical help for leg pain he had developed. He died in Emerson Hospital, where he was brought by ambulance.

The biography for Mr. Tomlinson's 2012 induction into the Internet Hall of Fame praised his e-mail program for fostering "a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate, including the way businesses, from huge corporations to tiny mom-and-pop shops, operate and the way millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans."

Mr. Tomlinson took that first step toward a communication revolution by walking away from MIT. After receiving a master's in electrical engineering, he initially stuck around for more graduate work. "I was working on my doctorate and not making a whole lot of progress," he recalled in a 2012 interview posted at theverge.com. An academic adviser suggested he seek work at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which hired Mr. Tomlinson in 1967. 

Once there, he worked on early components of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet. At one point, he read a memo with a mail box protocol someone else had written. "I looked at it and thought probably we could do something better," he said in the interview with The Verge.

When it came time to send that first e-mail, "I looked at the keyboard, and I thought: 'What can I choose here that won't be confused with a username?' If every person had an '@' sign in their name, it wouldn't work too well. But they didn't. They did use commas and slashes and brackets," he told Wired magazine in 2012. "Of the remaining three or four characters, the '@' sign made the most sense. It denoted where the user was . . . at. Excuse my English."

A stickler for language use and accuracy, Mr. Tomlinson said in a 2010 interview posted on motherboard.vice.com: "Personally, I prefer e-mails that use correctly spelled words."

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, N.Y., the oldest of three brothers. His father, Raymond Tomlinson, had worked in carpet mills and later ran a grocery store. His mother, the former Dorothy Aspin, worked for a dry cleaning business.

Mr. Tomlinson graduated from high school in Broadalbin, N.Y., north of Amsterdam, and received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., in 1963. He graduated from MIT with a master's two years later.

"He was always very intelligent and did very well in school," said his brother Gary, who lives in Broadalbin, as does their other brother, David. 

"Part of what he had was a certain elegance and simplicity of how he worked things through. He liked things to be effective and efficient," said Karen Seo, Mr. Tomlinson's companion of nearly a decade.

They met at Raytheon BBN Technologies when she worked there, too, during a lunchroom card game of Eleusis, in which one player creates a secret rule for how cards are played on top of each other and the remaining players use logic to guess the rule. On that day, Seo recalled, Mr. Tomlinson's rule had an algorithmic grace and sophistication that challenged the sharp minds of colleagues at the table.

The couple also had worked together in Lincoln to establish a European breed of miniature sheep in the United States. Whether figuring out fence issues for sheep or puzzling out a problem at work, "he was just focused intellectually on what he was doing," she said. "Something would catch his eye and be interesting and he'd think about it, and he might have a creative flash."

"He was this wonderful combination of quick and insightful and warm and loving and affectionate," she added. "He was so wonderful."

Mr. Tomlinson was married to Ann Tomlinson of West Palm Beach, Fla., with whom he had two daughters. He and his wife had been separated for many years, though not divorced.

A service will be announced for Mr. Tomlinson, who in addition to Seo, his two brothers, and his former wife leaves his daughters, Brooke Tomlinson MacKenzie of St. Petersburg, Fla., and Suzanne Tomlinson Schaffer of Cambridge, and two grandchildren.

In the Motherboard interview, Mr. Tomlinson said he used e-mail "all the time. It is my preferred means of communication." As for a habit common among certain e-mail users, he added: "I read the subject. For some e-mails, that is enough."

Not until the early 1990s, when the 25th anniversary of ARPANET was observed, did he truly recognize the magnitude of the change he had wrought. At the time of its creation, he told The Verge, e-mail "always seemed like something that anyone with a network connection would want. But at the time, there were probably 1,000 users on the ARPANET. . . . That's a lot if you have to put them in your address book, but not that many when you think about the size of the world as a whole."

Nevertheless, e-mail is "being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned," he said in that interview. "In particular, it's not strictly a work tool or strictly a personal thing. Everybody uses it in different ways, but they use it in a way they find works for them."

As for that first e-mail, however, Mr. Tomlinson could never recall what message he sent to himself. "The first e-mail is completely forgettable," he told NPR. "And, therefore, forgotten."

The writer is Obituary Editor at The Boston Globe. 
© The Boston Globe.