Ray Tomlinson — He really did invent email

Al Gore, your office is calling.

I'd never heard of Tomlinson (above) until I read Kate McKenzie's article headlined "Email — Is It Out of Control?" in this past Wednesday's Financial Times Digital Business supplement.

Shows how out of touch I am.

As if you needed more evidence.

Anyway, the article was the usual, formulaic "woe is my inbox, what am I gonna do?" type of deal but a small sidebar was most interesting and follows.

From the FT:

Electronic mail had already been in use for several years before ArpaNet, the US military network which formed the basis of the internet, was created in 1969.

However, at this stage it was limited to communications between different computer administrators on a single mainframe.

Ray Tomlinson, a programmer conducting research at the time into possible uses for the ArpaNet, developed network email and the address format used today, with the now ubiquitous "@" sign to separate user name and host name.

Mr Tomlinson's very first genuine email is long-forgotten but he believes it was something trivial, along the lines of "QWERTYUIOP".

His first serious message was simply to tell colleagues that email was now available.

He receives many questions about the origins of email and answers them on his web pages.

Among the points he makes are that "the early uses were not terribly different from the current uses. The exceptions are that there was only plain text in the messages and there was no spam."

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Among the many wonderful things I learned about Ray Tomlinson wandering around his website was that he, like me, abhors the hyphen in "e-mail" and believes it's long past time for the clueless to hop on board the train and drop the silly thing.

He writes, citing Donald Knuth, "... it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling 'e-mail.'"

Next we'll turn our attention to those who insist on "VoIP" rather than "VOIP."

You tell me: don't you find that one little "o" rather silly?

Then why are you still using it?