The inventor of person-to-person email used by billions of people around the world, Raymond Tomlinson, is dead at age 74.  His employer Raytheon didn't reveal details but some reports say Mr. Tomlinson died of a heart attack.

"Thank you, Ray Tomlinson, for inventing email and putting the @ sign on the map," read the message on Gmail's Twitter account.

Prior to 1971, email couldn't be shared with specific users of what passed for computer networks back then.  It was in that year that Ray Tomlinson decided to use the "@" key - an anachronism left over from the typewriter - to distinguish between user and network.  It was so little used that the computers really couldn't mistake it for any other purpose.  Plus, he often said it was "the only preposition on the keyboard".

"It is a symbol that probably would have gone away if not for email," said Raytheon spokeswoman Joyce Kuzman.  Raytheon eventually bought the company where Tomlinson was working at the time Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) of Boston.  The company was instrumental in the development of a very early version of the internet, called ARPANET.

Ray Tomlinson sent the world's very first email between two computers on the ARPANET, test phrases that were "entirely forgettable and I have, therefore, forgotten them."  The content didn't matter as much as the fact that they actually happened.

"I'm often asked 'Did I know what I was doing?" Mr. Tomlinson said when he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame.  "The answer is: Yeah I knew exactly what I was doing.  I just had no notion whatsoever about what the ultimate impact would be."

Despite his place in building the modern world, Ray Tomlinson wasn't addicted to email or the internet and was more likely to enjoy himself at his hobby of raising miniature sheep.