Ray Tomlinson, the man who invented email, passed away over the weekend after apparently suffering a heart attack.
Email inventor Ray Tomlinson passed away over the weekend
Mr. Tomlinson was one of the pioneers working on the precursor to the Internet, called ARPANET. He was responsible for creating the SNDMSG command that let users relay messages to each other. He sent the first email message to another computer in 1971.
Without his work, we never would've heard AOL's iconic "You've got mail!" alert, or experienced the amazing power of Eudora. We also wouldn't have seen spam go from a canned meat and Monty Python sketch to the bane of email readers everywhere.
Mr. Tomlinson was only 74 years old. He said that first email was insignificant. His life, however, was not.
[Thanks to the Verge for the heads up.]