I received sad news about Ray Tomlinson’s death from Craig Partridge and Vint
Cerf yesterday. I wanted to send what they wrote to the IETF list as well:
I just learned that Ray Tomlinson died this morning.
Ray Tomlinson had been at BBN since 1967. He’s best known for inventing the
concept of sending email over a computer network and choosing the @ sign as
the way to split the mailbox name from the host name. But that’s a fraction
of his amazing contributions to our field. Ray was one of a four person team
that created TENEX, the first operating system to support virtual memory
using paging. He wrote one of the first implementations of TCP and, when he
found data being duplicated in the received stream, devised methods to ensure
that sequence numbers were not duplicated that remain fundamental to TCP/IP
implementations today. He worked on the first object-oriented distributed
system and early multimedia email systems. And I’m sure I’m forgetting at
least half a dozen other ways Ray made our world better.
Craig
I knew and worked with Ray Tomlinson during the development of the ARPANET
and its host protocols and benefited, as have billions, from his seminal work
on networked electronic email. More important, from my personal perspective,
was his work with Bill Plummer on the first PDP-10 TENEX implementation of
TCP (and later TCP/IP). In 1975, he discovered that the TCP as specified in
December 1974 had flaws that led it to fail to detect duplicate packets and,
together with Yogen Dalal, developed the three-way handshake and initial
sequence number selection method to solve this problem. As Craig Partridge
summarizes, Ray was a long-time and creative contributor to the Internet,
operating systems, and many other highly practical applications in the
computer science and communications domains. He was a self-effacing and
humble man and extraordinary performer in our online world. I will miss his
thoughtful, low-key and always helpful counsel.
vint
Jari Arkko
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