Everybody Should Say Thank You to Ray Tomlinson
Why should you thank Ray Tomlinson? You might have never heard of his name before, but do you know that the email you use every day was his "child"?
Ray Tomlinson is known as "the father of email". He was born in New York in 1941. He attended college at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he took part in a program with IBM and in 1963 he received a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering.
In 1971, Ray created the first email system, which allowed people to send messages electronically from the same computer. But he thought that there might also be a way to send messages from different computers, which led to the birth of the email we know now. He chose the@ sign to separate(区别于)local from global(全球的) emails in the mailing address. "I used the '@' sign to show that the user was 'at' some other hosts (电脑主机)rather than being local," said Ray in an interview Person to person network email was born and user@ host became the standard for email addresses, as it remains today.
Ray Tomlinson died at the age of 74. Thank Ray Tomlinson for inventing the email and making the@sign well-known. Though he may not be as famous as Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, Ray Tomlinson surely has his place among the geniuses(天才) that gave us the convenience in our life.
