Ray Tomlinson, the American computer scientist who invented email and picked the "@" system to be used for addresses, has died at the age of 74. The computer legend reportedly suffered a heart attack on Saturday, March 5.

In a statement, Raytheon spokesperson Mike Doble said, "A true technology pioneer, Ray was the man who brought us email in the early days of networked computers."

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Tomlinson was one of the earliest pioneers of the Internet. He is responsible for developing the email system and he also sent the very first email way back in 1971 during the time he was still working at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN).

During his time at the BBN, the company was one of the frontrunner in the development of ARPANET, a very early version of the Internet. While working at BBN, Tomlinson's job was to look for problems that BBN could solve.

Based on past interviews, Tomlinson's work on the email system was not entirely sanctioned by his company. It was actually a project that he had been working on in secret. At that time, only a few people have access to personal computers and the popularity of the email system did not take off until several years later.

The idea of sending messages to other users have been thought out by computer scientists in the past. In fact, there are several versions of messaging platforms that allow users to share note on the same computer.

However, according to The Verge, it was Tomlinson who first came up with the idea of the SNDMSG command. Compared to iterations that came before it, the SNDMSG command sent mail files to the recipient's computer, essentially becoming that first networked messaging program.

Tomlinson also come up with the idea of using the @ symbol in order to designate a user from its host computer. In one of his interviews, Tomlinson explained why he picked the @ symbol saying, "It's the only preposition on the keyboard."

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