All Things Considered

The Man Who Made You Put Away Your Pen

November 15, 2009 5:07 PM

When was the last time you actually set pen to paper and mailed off a personal letter to someone? It's probably been awhile — and the man to blame is Ray Tomlinson.

Back in 1971, Tomlinson was a young engineer at the Boston firm of Bolt, Beranek and Newman — known today as BBN Technologies. He'd been given a task: Figure out something interesting to do with ARPANET, the newborn computer network that was the predecessor of the modern-day Internet.

"We were working on ways in which humans and computers could interact," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. But instead, Tomlinson started tinkering with the interaction — or lack of it — between distant colleagues who didn't answer their phones. He eventually found a way to send messages from one computer to another — inventing the system we now know as e-mail.

He began by sending messages between two computers in his office. "The keyboards were about 10 feet apart," he remembers. "I could wheel my chair from one to the other and type a message on one, and then go to the other, and then see what I had tried to send."

Unfortunately for posterity, Tomlinson doesn't remember what was in that first e-mail. The test messages he sent to himself were often just gibberish — strings of characters or a few phrases from the Gettysburg Address. "The first e-mail is completely forgettable," he says. "And, therefore, forgotten."

By way of his invention, Tomlinson is also responsible for the elevation of the @ sign from symbol to icon. To send messages between different computers, he needed a way to separate the names of senders and recipients from the names of their machines. The @ sign just made sense; it wasn't commonly used in computing back then, so there wouldn't be too much confusion. The symbol turns an e-mail address into a phrase; it means "user 'at' host," Tomlinson explains. "It's the only preposition on the keyboard."

Today, more than a billion people around the world type that @ sign every day. Tomlinson says that back in 1971, he did have some idea of the impact his invention would have.

View Transcript

GUY RAZ, host:

It was DARPA, or rather ARPA as it was known in 1969, that funded the first computer network, the system was called the ARPANET. And it was to the Internet what the Neanderthal is to modern man. As part of our series, The Net at 40, we're exploring the ideas behind it and talking with the people who helped build it, and before we meet our next guest, let me ask you this question: When was the last time you actually put pen to paper and mailed off a personal letter to someone? I can't remember the last time I did, and of course, the reason is email.

Now, back in 1971, Ray Tomlinson was working on a system that would allow him to send message from one computer to another, and he needed a way to separate the name of the sender from the name of the computer so the addresses wouldn't get confused. He decided to use the @ symbol.

Tomlinson's messaging system eventually became the email that we use today. And Ray Tomlinson is in Boston.

Welcome to the show.

Mr. RAY TOMLINSON: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

RAZ: Could you ever have imagined that the system you were working on in 1971 would change the way we all communicate today?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: I guess I could have imagined it. What I didn't imagine was how quickly that would happen. What it took was a very marked growth in networks and computers to make it all happen.

RAZ: And what were you trying to do in 1971?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: Well, in 1971, I was busily trying to find things to use this new-fangled network for. I heard about a proposal to send messages to be printed with a printer and stuffed away in mailboxes for people to read, and I said these messages should go to computers, and so I thought about it for a bit and then decided to put together a system that might do that.

RAZ: And so you you were just kind of doing this on your own. Nobody said hey, Ray, can you invent email?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: The statement of work did not say: Thou shall go forth and invent email. But we were working on ways in which humans and computers could interact and try to improve that interaction.

RAZ: Do you remember what your first email said?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: Well, everybody asks that, and of course, I don't remember every single word of it. The main thing is there were lots of test messages. You know, these things don't work out of the box because there was no box. Every time you test, you have to generate some kind of a message, and you might drag your fingers across the keyboard or just type the opening phrase from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address or something else.

So technically, the first email is completely forgettable and, therefore, forgotten.

RAZ: Who did your first message go to?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: All the test messages were sent to myself. I had two computers that were literally side by side, the keyboards were about 10 feet apart, and I could wheel my chair from one to the other and type a message in one and then go to the other and see what I tried to send.

RAZ: Now, why did you pick the @ sign, this iconic symbol? How did you pick that symbol?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: Yeah. Well, certainly, it wasn't an icon back in 1971. But it was a key on the keyboard that did not appear in users' names, did not appear in host names. It made sense. It's the preposition. I mean, it's user at host. It is the only preposition on the keyboard.

RAZ: So did you become an Internet billionaire from this?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: No, I did not.

RAZ: You're not a billionaire today?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: Not by several orders of magnitude.

RAZ: Hundreds of millions?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: No, I've often thought about what it would have taken, you know, what fraction of a cent per @ sign would it take to make me very comfortable, and it's not it's a very small fraction.

RAZ: So Ray Tomlinson, do you feel comfortable with the title Ray Tomlinson, inventor of email?

Mr.�TOMLINSON: Oh, yeah, you can call me that.

RAZ: Fair enough.

That's Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email and a principal engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman, now known as BBN Technologies. You can find out more about the invention of email at our Web site. That's npr.org.

Ray Tomlinson, thanks very much.

Mr.�TOMLINSON: Well, you're welcome, and I'm glad I had this opportunity to speak to you and your audience. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.

Source: NPR

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