Ray Tomlinson - Inventor of the Email.

   Google mail a.k.a gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail, e.t.c all have one thing in common - they are used to send electronic mails - and you have probably used one or more of these email platforms before at one point in time or the other. You have also most likely heard of Larry Page, Jerry Yang and a host of others who created their own platforms for sending electronic mails but the person who sent the very first email was a man named Ray Tomlinson.
   Ray Tomlinson was an American Computer Programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system which was the precursor to the internet.

• He grew up in Broadalbin, New York where he attended Broadalbin Central School.
• After graduating and receiving his Bachelor's degree from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in New York and receiving his Master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he joined the company now known as BBN Technologies where he helped developed the TENEX operating system which included the ARPANET Network Control Program.
• It was during the course of his employment there, when he was asked to change a particular program which sent messages to other users of a time-sharing computer to run on TENEX, that he added additional code from a file transfer program called CPYNET to the program so that messages could be sent to users on other computers. This was in reality was the first email.
• This system was thus able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET as opposed to the previous method which allowed mails to be sent to others who used the same computer.
• He achieved this by using the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine. This scheme ever since then, has been used and is still used in email addresses.
• Since then, Ray Tomlinson has been and is still internationally known and credited as the inventor of the email.
• He has had so many awards and honors to his name; the most recent given in 2012, when he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame which is an honorary lifetime achievement award given to individuals who have made significant contributions to the development and advancement of the internet by the Internet Society.
• Sadly though, his life came to an end on the 5th of March 2016 at age 74.