15 Iconic People Who Changed Internet


#9 Ray Tomlinson

Known as Father of Email.

Raymond Samuel Tomlinson is a US programmer who implemented an email system in 1971 on the ARPANET. It was the first system able 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 has been 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". Tomlinson later commented that these "test messages were entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them.”

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."

#8 Robert Tappan Morris

Created First Worm Virus.

Robert Tappan Morris is an American computer scientist, best known for creating the Morris Worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet—and subsequently becoming the first person convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Morris created the worm while he was a graduate student at Cornell University.[7] The original intent, according to him, was to gauge the size of the Internet. He released the worm from MIT to conceal the fact that it actually originated from Cornell. The worm exploited several vulnerabilities to gain entry to targeted systems.

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