WORLD CHANGER
Inventor of Email Dies
The man who created email is dead at 74.
MIGUEL RIOPA/AFP/Getty
Ray Tomlinson, the tech genius who invented the modern email, died on Saturday. He was 74.
Tomlinson created the first email back in 1971, over twenty years before it became popular with the general public. At the time he was working for ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet, and had no idea how far his idea would go.
"I'm often asked, did I know what I was doing?” Tomlinson said in 2012. “And the answer is yeah, I knew exactly what I was doing, I just had no notion whatsoever what the ultimate impact would be."
Tomlinson is also the man behind the ubiquitous “@” symbol. Though he did not design it, he chose the symbol to signify “at” in email addresses.