Fwd: [jari.arkko at piuha.net: Ray Tomlinson]

Mon Mar 7 13:33:47 UTC 2016

Forward from the main IETF mailing list.
Includes comments from Craig Partridge and Vint Cerf.

---rsk

----- Forwarded message from Jari Arkko <jari.arkko at piuha.net> -----

> From: Jari Arkko <jari.arkko at piuha.net>
> Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2016 11:02:13 +0000
> To: IETF <ietf at ietf.org>
> Subject: Ray Tomlinson
> 
> 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
> 

----- End forwarded message -----