#1 Charles Herzfeld

Charles Herzfeld is an American scientist and scientific manager who worked for the U.S. Government. He is best known for his time as the Director of DARPA, where, among other things, he personally took the decision to authorize the creation of the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

In 2012, Herzfeld was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society.

#2 Raymond Tomlinson

Raymond Tomlinson is a US programmer who implemented an email system in 1971 on the ARPANET. It was the first system to send mail between users on different hosts connected to the ARPANET. To achieve this, he used the ‘@’ sign to separate the user from their machine, which is used in email addresses ever since.

The first email Ray Tomlinson sent was a test e-mail. It was not preserved and Tomlinson describes it as insignificant, something like "QWERTYUIOP". This is commonly misquoted as "The first e-mail was QWERTYUIOP".

At first, his email messaging system wasn't thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to his colleague Jerry Burchfiel, he said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."

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