Raytheon BBN Technologies

His Development of Email Has Contributed Significantly to the Great Technological Advances in Human Communications

Cambridge, Mass., June 18, 2009 — BBN Technologies, an advanced technology solutions firm, announced today that Raymond S. Tomlinson, a principal engineer at BBN, was honored by the Prince of Asturias Foundation with the 2009 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research for the development of email and its advancement of human communications.

The Prince of Asturias Foundation was founded in the city of Oviedo, Spain in 1980 to consolidate links between the Principality and the Prince of Asturias and to contribute to encouraging and promoting scientific, cultural, and humanistic values.

The honor recognizes Tomlinson for his development of email, which quickly became one of the internet’s most popular applications and due to its immediacy and low cost revolutionized the way people all over the world communicate. Email has fundamentally transformed society by changing the way people exchange thoughts and information, including the way businesses, from huge corporations to tiny mom-and-pop shops, operate and the way millions of people shop, bank, and keep in touch with friends and family, whether they are across town or across oceans. Today, tens of millions of computers are in use every day, and email remains the most popular application, with a billion and a half users spanning the globe and communicating across the traditional barriers of time and space.

Tomlinson stated, "I want to thank the Prince of Asturias Foundation for this great honor. It is a privilege to have my name associated with this prestigious foundation and added to the very impressive roster of Prince of Asturias Laureates."

In 1967 Tomlinson joined the technology company Bolt Beranek and Newman, now BBN Technologies, where he helped develop the TENEX operating system, which included the ARPANET and TELNET implementations. In 1971 he developed ARPANett’s first application for email by combining the SNDMSG and CPYNET programs so messages could be sent to users on other computers. He chose the @ sign to separate local from global emails in the mail address. Soon, the @ sign became the digital icon that it is today.

During his 37 years at BBN Technologies, Tomlinson has made significant contributions to many additional projects. He was the principal designer of Jericho, a single-user computer for use by BBN scientists, and he implemented a large portion its operating system. As a member of the Monarch team, Tomlinson developed the instruction sequencer for a large, shared-memory parallel processor computer using custom-designed VLSI circuits. He was the principal software architect for the Pathfinder project, which developed systems for health and status monitoring of, and communication between, members of special teams operating in situations with inadequate information infrastructure. He has also worked on a video information server and multi-media conferencing systems. For the past 22 years Tomlinson has held the title of Principal Engineer, a position of distinction at BBN Technologies.

Tomlinson has also played a key role in the development of time-shared computing. He developed the software for the real-time input-output system of a time-shared SDS-940 computer system and was one of the principal designers of the TENEX time-sharing monitor for the DEC PDP-10 computer.

Tomlinson has received numerous awards, including the American Computer Museum's George R. Stibitz Computer & Communications Pioneer Award and the Webby award for lifetime achievement, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. He has been inducted into the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Alumni Hall of Fame and received the Discover Magazine award for technical innovation.

Tomlinson earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a M.S. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu. Mr. Tomlinson has published and presented extensively on processor hardware design, distributed architecture, networking protocols, time sharing, and speech synthesis.

About BBN Technologies
BBN Technologies is a legendary R&D organization that leverages its substantial intellectual property portfolio to produce advanced, repeatable solutions such as the Boomerang shooter detection system. With expertise spanning information security, speech and language processing, networking, distributed systems, and sensing and control systems, BBN scientists and engineers have amassed a substantial collection of innovations and patented solutions. BBN now employs over 780 people in seven locations in the US: Cambridge, Massachusetts (headquarters); Arlington, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; Middletown, Rhode Island; San Diego, California; St. Louis Park, Minnesota; and O’Fallon, Illinois. For more information, visit www.bbn.com.