Raymond Tomlinson, who has been acknowledged as the inventor of e-mail, died Saturday at the age of 74, allegedly due to a heart attack.
In 1971, the Internet pioneer was a computer programmer in Cambridge, Mass., for a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman when he came up with the idea of a program that can allow message sending from one network to another.
He made use of the Arpanet, a network that is now considered to be the predecessor of the Internet.
In his pursuit to create an effective internal messaging network, he also ended up pioneering the use of the "@" sign, which has now become a standard part of e-mail addresses.
"I looked at the keyboard, and I thought: 'What can I choose here that won't be confused with a username?'" Tomlinson said when asked in an interview back in 2012 why he chose that particular sign.
In the 1980s, the government and military started using the e-mail system, and by the time the Internet became consumer ready, e-mailing bloomed alongside it.
When asked about the contents of the first ever e-mail in history, he admitted that it must be something completely forgettable, since he cannot recall it, at all.
"They were all test messages, and whatever came to hand as I put my fingers on the keyboard is what I would send," he said. "The first one could have said almost anything."
The death was confirmed by fellow Internet pioneers, who are also part of the Internet Hall of Fame - a recognition given to Tomlinson in 2012. Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the web, tweeted about the e-mail inventor's passing.
Grady Booch, another pioneer famous for developing the Unified Modeling Language, also confirmed the death through a tweet.
"Tomlinson's email program brought about 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," Tomlinson's Hall of Fame biography reads.
