We are at that point in the internet’s life cycle where we are starting to say goodbye to the early pioneers who helped put down its roots. This past weekend I learned from Vint Cerf’s Twitter account about the passing of Ray Tomlinson, a computer scientist who figured out how to use the @ symbol as part of a simple email naming convention. However, Tomlinson was more than that. He helped write the first implementations of TCP. He contributed to the internet, operating systems and other communication and computing applications. There aren’t many like him today. Thank you, Ray, for your work, which now allows us to live our lives with the network!

P.S. It is a shame that the same media that takes less than 30 seconds to write about unicorns took a whole 36 hours to pay tribute to the man whose work influences everything we do on the internet.