Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email and the man who picked the @ symbol for addresses, has died aged 74; Tomlinson, who became a cult figure for his invention in 1971 of a program for ARPANET, the Internet’s predecessor, that allowed people to send person-to-person messages to other computer users on other servers.

Mr Tomlinson did not invent electronic mail. The practice of transmitting messages between terminals attached to the same central processing unit (CPU), using programs such as SNDMSG (sendmessage), had been around for a while. He did, however, transmit the first message between terminals attached to separate CPUs, albeit that these two computers stood side-by-side in the same room. In those messages Mr Tomlinson also pioneered the e-mail address format that is used to this day, separating the user’s login name from the host computer’s name by the hitherto obscure “@” symbol.