The Internet is old enough now that the people who were instrumental in shaping it are reaching old age. One of those people, Ray Tomlinson, who is widely credited as the inventor of modern email, has died at age 74, according to CNN.
While the concept of sending messages between computers wasn't new when Tomlinson, an MIT grad who was working for a Boston tech company at the time, started tinkering with it in 1971, he was the one who simplified it and settled on a rarely-used keyboard symbol—the @ sign—for use in email addresses to make direct messages possible. The news of his death came from his current employer, Raytheon.
Google was among those paying tribute to Tomlinson's contribution to tech.
Of course, Tomlinson invented email decades before computers became affordable enough that millions of people began using email, and it was even longer before it became a hopeless time suck that's disrupting everyone's lives, and that thing that your boss expects you to check on Saturdays.
Some people began writing email off as obsolete in the age of texting and social media messaging, but the number of emails sent and received on an average day reached 205 billion in 2015, the most ever, so just like all those unread messages in your Outlook inbox, it's not going away any time soon.
