Email inventor Ray Tomlinson dead aged 74 sparking wave of tributes for computing legend

Ray Tomlinson: The founder of email died following a suspected heart attack

The computing legend who invented email has died aged 74.

The 'godfather of email' Ray Tomlinson died following a suspected heart attackyesterday morning, reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

Tomlinson was a part a team of computer programmers at research and design company Bolt Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies ).

In 1971, he developed an application that allowed messages to be sent back and forth between computers.

He used @ to separate the user name from the host name.

In an interview with NPR from 2009, he said: "The keyboards were about 10 feet apart…I could wheel my chair from one to the other and type a message on one, and then go to the other, and then see what I had tried to send.”

By the 1990s email had become a pillar of the Internet alongside the World Wide Web and New Yorker Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

His official biography page on the Internet Hall of Fame website praises Tomlinson for "fundamentally changing the way people communicate".

"Today, tens of millions of email-enabled devices are in use every day. Email remains the most popular application, with over a billion and a half users spanning the globe and communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space," his citation reads.