Forward from the main IETF mailing list.
Includes comments from Craig Partridge and Vint Cerf.
---rsk
----- Forwarded message from Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@piuha.net> -----
From: Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@piuha.net>
Date: Sun, 6 Mar 2016 11:02:13 +0000
To: IETF <ietf@ietf.org>
Subject: Ray TomlinsonI 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.
>
> vintJari Arkko
----- End forwarded message -----