Inventor of email passes away
We all take certain thing so for granted as they are integrated deeply into our lives, email is such a thing. Raymond Tomlinson, widely credited as the inventor of modern email, died Saturday.
Raytheon Co., his employer, on Sunday confirmed his death. Email existed in a limited capacity before Tomlinson in that electronic messages could be shared amid multiple people within a limited framework. But until his invention in 1971 of the first network person-to-person email there was no way to send something to a specific person at a specific address.
Tomlinson chose the “@” (”at”) symbol to connect the username with the destination address and it has now become a cultural icon.
"It is with great sadness we acknowledge the passing of our colleague and friend, Ray Tomlinson. A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers.," Raytheon said in a statement. "His work changed the way the world communicates and yet, for all his accomplishments, he remained humble, kind and generous with his time and talents, He will be missed by one and all."
While he was a holder of numerous awards and other accolades, co-workers say he was modest. And, surprisingly, not a frequent checker of email.
According to a biography on the Internet Hall of Fame, Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York in 1941. He attended college at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he participated in an internship program with IBM and received a degree in electrical engineering in 1963. He later earned a S.M. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Numerous admirers expressed their appreciation on social media. Gmail tweeted: Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map. #RIP.
Contributing: The Associated Press
High inventory to result in tablet price cuts? - 11/22/2011 12:09 PM
Right after Christmas might be good to finally pick up a tablet, global inventory of Android tablets is expected to be pretty high after the holiday season, which will likely result in price cuts as v...
DRAM module makers start dumping inventory - 08/14/2008 07:32 AM
With DRAM contract prices bidding farewell to a upward pricing trend that had been maintained since April, DRAM module makers have started dumping their inventory, which they have been building from t...
Senior Member
Posts: 1963
Joined: 2004-12-03
You could make a custom keyboard layout using MSKLC and add those symbols yourself. As for lowercase and uppercase, just use Ctrl+Alt+
Sounds like a pain, I know. At least, I got the Alt Gr key on my keyboard, which is Ctrl+Alt in one single key.

Maybe layouts including Greek characters used in science already exist... who knows?
Senior Member
Posts: 951
Joined: 2010-08-24
Funny - now that I think of it, I had no idea what the @ symbol was for before email. I decided to look it up and to my amazement, it is pretty useless. Yes, there are purposes for it, but they're not even used today.
Which gets me to wonder: Of all the symbols known to mankind, they chose @ for the 2 key!? Why!? There are so many better choices that would be used far more often (and might even make programming easier), such as degrees, umlaut, alpha, beta, gamma, theta, omega, division, plus/minus, not-equal, infinity, and so on. And yet, they chose "at".
Ugh...
Well, '@' or 'at' makes a certain kind of sense. Just by the format.
person@provider.country
So you're sending an email to 'person' who has an account at 'provider.country'.
Moderator
Posts: 4056
Joined: 2004-11-20
The @ symbol has been used in IRC since the later 80's for OP status.
Senior Member
Posts: 2640
Joined: 2011-05-17
In case anyone was interested. Was a cool read about the history of the @ symbol.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-accidental-history-of-the-symbol-18054936/?no-ist
Senior Member
Posts: 10121
Joined: 2003-03-25
What a shame, he had a massive impact on the modern world.