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One of the forefathers of the Internet has passed away, and while it was not global news, Ray Tomlinson changed the world

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson connected two computer programs, called SNDMSG and CPYNET, to fundamentally change the way people communicate.

And while the engineering was groundbreaking, Tomlinson also made an important decision in the history of linguistics. He decided to use the ‘@’ symbol for email, creating the user@host system that is integral to modern communication.

In doing so, Tomlinson fundamentally laid the groundwork that the Internet would be a place created for the people by the people and made the ‘@’ symbol a historically important part of the language of modernity.

Tomlinson, the inventor of email, died on Saturday of an apparent heart attack, as confirmed on Twitter by fellow Internet pioneer Vincent Cerf on social media. He was 74.

Very sad news: Ray Tomlinson has passed away. https://t.co/Ghi8B2m3IX

— vinton g cerf (@vgcerf) March 5, 2016

To put into perspective just how groundbreaking Tomlinson’s inventions was; in 1971 Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in China, the country of Zaire (no longer in existence) was founded and Bill Gates was 16 years old.

The idea of email was not an invention by Tomlinson, but rather he was the first engineer to succeed in putting the theory into practice. Before the SNDMSG technology, elite computer technology could send messages to other users on the same computer.

In this context, one computer transferring a message to another computer was revolutionary.

When he developed the technology, Tomlinson chose the ‘@’ symbol and in the process took an obscure character in the english language and hoisted it into the global lexicon.

Later, he was the key developer of the ‘subject’, ‘from’, and ‘date’ lines that are still an essential part of modern email.

Tomlinson was part of the first class inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012. A snippet of his official Hall of Fame biography beautifully sums up the importance of his contribution to the field.

“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. Today, tens of millions of email-enabled devices are in use every day. Email remains the most popular application, with over a billion and a half users spanning the globe and communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space.”

It is difficult to overstate just how important the first SNDMSG is in the context of global history.

So, what was the first email sent? Well, Tomlinson himself did not remember, calling it an insignificant message.

“Something like ‘QWERTYUIOP,’” he said.

And while the first email ever sent was entirely forgettable, the fact that it worked can be considered as important as Samuel Morse’ code, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone call or Mark Zuckerberg’s social network.

Rest in peace Ray Tomlinson.

“We are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We see more, and things that are more distant, than they did, not because our sight is superior or because we are taller than they, but because they raise us up, and by their great stature add to ours” —Issac Newton

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