
Ray Tomlinson, Inventor of Email, Has Died - jrbedard
http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/6/11168718/ray-tomlinson-dead-inventor-of-email-obituary
======
theologic
Actually email is worth thinking about because if you didn't live it, you
might not understand it's path or impact.

I came to age in technology at a strange age, being at a start-up in 1979 in
high school, then getting my EE degree at the University of Washington in the
late 80s, before joining IBM.

For those of you not around and the time, by the time I got to the UW, we had
email and could send messages worldwide with BITNET. However, it was not
critical and not used as much as you might think. Actually, USENET was a much
bigger part of any geeks life. USENET had an amazing impact on everything we
did in academia, and I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek
from Europe saying that he was trying to do his own operating system. I was
more hardware oriented, and I missed my chance to contribute to early Linux.

Where I first saw email becoming central to a culture is when I got to IBM.
PROFS notes, or email, had a massive impact on the entire culture. The
combination of calendar and email and the internal culture that had a terminal
in every conference room would be familiar with most readers of Hacker news.
You could have survived with what they offered in today's modern world.

The person responsible for the addition of email to PROFS was not influenced
by what was happening in BITNET. The email in university was like a home
brewed computer. I am not saying it wasn't important, but I'm saying that the
adoption of email wasn't tied to this. However, the fact that IBM pushed email
was as central as IBM creating a personal computer, only in this case it
wasn't following Apple.

I saw an article on the founder of IBM PROFS email, and so I hunted him down
on email while I was at IBM. I regret I cannot remember his name, but I wanted
to say he was in research at Almaden, but this may be an human ECC error.
However, I do remember that I wanted to know how obvious the creation of email
was for everybody, and how much it was embraced. He stated at the time that
most people thought that it would not be central to business life. Nobody saw
the impact of email coming.

In the list of cognitive biases, we call it simply "Hindsight Bias."

It just goes to show how the obvious is not obvious until it happens.

My question, "What is happen today, that will be the next email that we are
all missing?"

~~~
ilvnvtoomuch
"..I remember getting on MINIX USENET group and some geek from Europe saying
that he was trying to do his own operating system..."

I can relate to a certain extent. I had the opportunity to interact with an
early Google employee (Ex-professor) and I did't pursue or dive into that
domain. I could have been more successful in a technical field. Now I do
Program Management :)

------
contingencies
Nobody here has considered the environmental impact of this invention. How
much physical mail have we stopped lugging around the globe because of email?

Then social impact: by popularizing near-instantaneous global written
interpersonal communication we have removed the walled garden of national
language, culture and politics. Suddenly, a great force of inertia demands
that every profession, every social and political issue must be viewed within
its truly global context. Of course, we're not quite there yet but it's a
clear trajectory.

Connecting the hive mind was really a red pill moment for humanity.

~~~
webkike
Apparently the amount is about 30 billion pieces of mail, whatever that
means[1]

[1]
[http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2013/10/bg284...](http://www.heritage.org/~/media/Images/Reports/2013/10/bg2848/BG-
USPS-future-chart-2.ashx)

~~~
contingencies
That figure appears to be annually, and United States USPS 'first class' mail
only:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20120114113728/http://about.usps...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120114113728/http://about.usps.com/who-
we-are/postal-history/first-class-mail-1926-2010.pdf)

~~~
yitchelle
Wow! Not even sure if that can be extrapolated into other markets such as
China or India (although the take impact is not as big due to their lack of
internet access). The impact is very big indeed.

May have to start calling "post office" the "cargo office" as cargo would be
the only item physically sent.

~~~
contingencies
Actually I live in mainland China. They really jumped on the internet. Letters
basically no longer exist here, it's even rare for bills to be sent by mail,
it's all electronic: they skipped that stage. Just as you say: cargo office,
except that unlike the US with Fedex and DHL, here they have about 20 private
national courier companies, and their prices are really low.

------
shmerl
We are mighty lucky that e-mail managed to become interoperable and we can
easily send e-mails to users of any server without breaking our heads and
wondering whether their servers and clients will understand that. Instant
messaging on the other hand failed miserably in this regard.

~~~
patrickaljord
> interoperable and we can easily send e-mails to users of any server without
> breaking our heads and wondering whether their servers and clients will
> understand that

Not sure this holds true anymore in practice. Try to set up your own email
server, your emails will probably get sent to spam by gmail, yahoo etc. Sure,
it is technically possible, but it is time consuming and still risky to use it
for business. At least you can still use your own domain and switch providers
(google apps, outlook etc).

~~~
xorcist
> Try to set up your own email server, your emails will probably get sent to
> spam by gmail, yahoo etc.

That problem is so overstated it's not even funny. Your email will get sent to
spam if your IP adress is blacklisted, or if you send spam. It's actually
gotten harder to get blacklisted over time, as people has gotten more tolerant
towards semi-spam ("newsletters" and stuff) and people are generally more
conservative in blacklisting whole networks these days.

Don't misbehave. Don't be a bad net citizen. Get your net and DNS in order,
and the default Debian set up of postfix will do you just fine. I do it and
most of my customers over the years have done it too. Some outsource their
spam filtering, a few outsource their whole email, but most outside the small
startup world still tend to keep their own mail server.

~~~
bluegate010
I just recently had weeks of headaches over getting my server's email sent to
spam. After setting up a brand new domain, with SPF, DKIM, etc., I woke up one
morning to find my domain wasn't resolving.

Eventually I learned it was because Radix, my TLD registry, had noticed my
domain on the Spamhaus Domain Blocklist. Who knows why it was added; I
definitely hadn't been sending spam. Radix, being proactive, placed a
'serverHold' DNS status on my domain name, preventing it from resolving.

Luckily Spamhaus has an automated form for dealing with false positives.
Eventually Radix removed the status. (Though, a week later it was back up, for
no reason. Had to badger them for over a week to get the status removed again.
Would not recommend them.) It's very lucky I wasn't trying to do anything with
that domain like run a business, or rely on @<domainname> addresses to work.

TL;DR the problem is definitely not overstated.

~~~
xorcist
I think that's a good example of overstating the problem right there. Who
knows why it was added? Well, it certainly wasn't because you hadn't
outsourced your email.

Your registry could (and probably would) have put your domain on hold
independently of where your MX points. Nothing short of choosing another TLD
will protect you from your registry playing games with you.

------
sethammons
I work in the email space; thanks to this guy's invention, I can feed my
family and have a solid financial life. It is amazing, the web of events, that
shape our lives and the lives of others. RIP.

~~~
jacquesm
Even lots of people that are not directly active in the email space owe a part
of their income to them, I find it a lot easier to imagine a world without
smartphones or the web than I find it to imagine a world without email.

~~~
jamesrcole
I think it's fair to say that email has had a big impact on the modern world.

I wonder how much the economy would break down, and have to change, if email
suddenly went away?

And even if someone doesn't use it that much for personal communication, it's
part of the underlying net infrastructure (think account-creation verification
emails, password reset emails, bank statements, etc).

~~~
brianclements
_" I wonder how much the economy would break down, and have to change, if
email suddenly went away?"_

Or suddenly went proprietary.

~~~
jacquesm
> Or suddenly went proprietary.

It might even happen.

~~~
w1ntermute
It almost did happen. Embrace, extend, extinguish.

~~~
chei0aiV
It pretty much did happen:

[https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-
be...](https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/google-has-most-of-my-email-because-it-
has-all-of-yours)
[https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/](https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2015/sep/15/email/)

------
bane
It's funny how core of a service the idea of email is...even pre-internet.
Once companies started supplying dumb terminals connected to the corporate
mainframe on every executive's desk, "electronic mail" quickly supplanted
paper memos.

In my college OS class we had to build a *nix-like OS from the ground up and
one of the required basic services we had to build was user-to-user messaging.
After hacking out basic versions of "ls" and "cat" that was pretty much what
we built next.

What was not so obvious, and much harder to do, and required something like
the internet to solve was system-to-system mail transfer, which Tomlinson
created. It turns out to be a strangely hard problem to do well. It's not hard
to get it up and running, but the edge-cases and abuses have plagued us ever
since. Maybe the problem is humans.

------
AdamN
Internet pioneers used to invent tools of communication like email, TCP/IP,
DNS - now the pioneers are building walled gardens like Facebook, Twitter,
Google :-/

~~~
maxerickson
Facebook, Twitter and Google are the railroad tycoons (Twitter might only be
aspiring), they came after the pioneers and built valuable infrastructure,
capturing much of the value for themselves.

If you are going to torture an analogy, I say make it scream.

------
bpicolo
Have lost a lot of great names in Computer Science lately. While sad, it's a
great testament to how fast computers have evolved. Everything here that we
have has evolved within a single generation. Incredible. The pace of human
technological growth in the last 100 years has been explosive. It seems from
my perspective now, it's slowed, but I'm now thinking that assumption is very
wrong. I think in retrospect it's going to continue to explode, and it's only
my view of what I'm using currently that makes it seem that way. Even a few
slow years can be easily ignored in context of the leaps and bounds technology
tends to evolve in: The transistor, the internet, the world as mobile...

The future is, and will always be, awesome potential.

------
webwanderings
Email is the only revolutionary communication technology there is. The next
evolution is that of email lists. Anything else beyond these two, be that
Twitter, Facebook, etc (they are nothing more than public email) are not
evolutionary in true sense.

I'd only take away BCC feature from the email as a mistake, or useless. Email-
lists should have been the true BCC.

~~~
bcook
Only? IRC is pretty rockin'.

~~~
webwanderings
IRC/Live-chatting does not really solve any new problem which the Email has
not solved already. If you look at live-chatting in the corporate and the
personal world, you'll see that most often (and when things gets tough) people
tend to either pick up a phone, or they'd send long-form email.

~~~
ghaff
A lot of people would disagree with you. Sure, once something requires higher
bandwidth or longer-form 1:1 or 1:few communication, it makes sense to switch
modes but there's a lot of value in short-form synchronous communications. I
don't actually use IRC/IM comms a lot myself (other than as a sidebar for
video meetings) but I have in the past and would do more in different
citcumstances.

------
aws_ls
Email is such a profound application on Internet. Kind of like air or water,
and therefore its (nearly) free[1]. The walled garden social networks are like
Coke (or sugary water) or polluted air in comparison.

Aren't there any poets here, who could pen a few couplets in his memory &
respect? Just saying RIP to such a great Engineer, feels so not enough. Feel
proud to call myself an Engineer, when such giants also call them one.

[1] - we have freedom via choice. If you use gmail/yahoo/etc you know you are
doing a trade off. But its comforting to have choice.

------
techdragon
I think I'll try to honour this day by sending as little email as possible. As
close to an "email moment of silence" as I can achieve I suppose.

------
cantrevealname
> Thee very first email has been lost to time. As he said in an NPR interview
> from 2009, they were just random strings of text.

As usual, technical people easily miss the marketing value of sound bites. He
should have invented a clever and catchy story about the first email.

Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that
would a _lie_ , forgetting the thousand "lies" that we are all complicit in
(Santa Claus, tooth fairy, "your tie/haircut looks nice", "sorry, I don't have
any change to give you").

EBay founder Omidyar said that eBay was invented to trade Pez dispensers, a
story he's now admitted is completely false, but no one seems to be too worked
up over that. Apparently Omidyar understands the difference between a lie (has
an actual negative effect on someone) and marketing fluff (makes for an
interesting story but is just trivia).

For such an influential person--in the sense that he had a huge impact on the
world--Tomlinson is completely unknown. I'm guessing that his financial reward
for inventing email was essentially nothing as well.

~~~
timthorn
> Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that
> would a lie.

Technical people, and people with integrity.

~~~
cantrevealname
So you're calling Pierre Omidyar a _______?

Did you tell your kids about Santa Claus? Did your parents tell you about
Santa Claus? Does it follow that you or your parents lack integrity?

The world is not truth vs lies. There's more nuance. This illustrates why many
brilliant technical people lacking marketing sense are relegated to obscurity.

~~~
umanwizard
> Did you tell your kids about Santa Claus?

I don't have kids, and if I ever do, I'll tell them Santa is a fun legend
people like to play along with, but that it isn't real.

> Did your parents tell you about Santa Claus?

Yes, but by the time my sister was born, they had changed their tune to what I
describe above, and she didn't seem to suffer any development ill effects,
still enjoyed Christmas, etc.

~~~
poweribo
wait till you have kids then. tell them the whole world is made of lies. start
em young.

------
mattdeboard
What's the criteria for the black band at the top of the page when a tech
luminary passes away?

------
ericfrederich
Too bad he never got to see it replaced with something like Google Wave

------
elcct
100% of people who invented email, died.

------
iMark
Surely a black banner day, if ever there was one?

~~~
publicfig
I've noticed that they've pretty much quit doing that, and as much as I agree
with you, I think that's for the best. You never want it to turn into a
competition as to whether or not someone's death was meaningful enough to
merit it, and at the same time avoid just having a constant black bar in the
title.

------
dboreham
Not to take anything away from his legacy, but isn't it a stretch to talk
about the "invention" of email when we had telex, telegrams, heliography,
scrolls of vellum carried by Roman messenger, and so on? What's left to
invent?

~~~
rpathak1
I just stumbled upon an site
"[http://www.inventorofemail.com/"](http://www.inventorofemail.com/") which
claims that Ray Tomlinson didn't invented email and it was an false claim.

"Fact #2: Ray Tomlinson “did not invent email”, he modified SNDMSG for
exchanging text messages across computers - See more at:
[http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp#False-...](http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp#False-
Claim-2")

~~~
tatterdemalion
That is the website of a person whose claim to have invented email has been
widely dismissed.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai)

~~~
thomasfromcdnjs
Aha he is married to Fran Drescher (The Nanny!

~~~
nocman
Sounds to me like they didn't actually get married. From his wikipedia
article:

'Ayyadurai later said it was not "a formal wedding or marriage", but a
celebration of their "friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends
and her family.'

(
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai)
)

