I was joking with one of our Federal News Radio sales people that an email she sent me with important information about a sponsored show must have been 300 down in my stack for the last couple of days, so I missed it. She’s one of those people who keeps her inbox down to a handful of messages. I’ve got a total of 50,000 stored messages in four accounts. I use them as an unstructured database in which I search for contacts.

Moments later, I read that the inventor of the earliest functioning email protocol, Ray Tomlinson, had died at 74. Published reports said he was not himself particularly addicted to email. I once read that Orville Wright, seeing a big aluminum airplane in the 1930s, reportedly wondered aloud why people were in such a big hurry.

Few remember or probably care, but before Tomlinson the @ sign was used in accounting. Here I’m quoting Wikipedia, which I rarely do. But apparently @ stood for “at a rate of”, as in pricing for commercial items. When Tomlinson chose it for his email protocol, he ensured — perhaps unwittingly — the funny little symbol would define an age.

Texting has crept in as a rival to classic email. But the sheer functionality into which email has grown has made it indispensable. Federal agencies, dealing with the cloud computing policies, mostly chose email as their initial critical application to move out of their data centers and into commercial clouds. Email has become a crucial component in cyber theft and warfare. The mobility movement exploded after Blackberry came out with an email-oriented device.

Nearly as many email accounts exist as people on earth. Hundreds of billions of emails traverse the Internet every day. That most of it is spam and yet email still reigns as the top communication tool shows how durable email is. The Radicati Group predicted a couple of years ago consumer email volumes will drop as people communicate on social media — but few individuals that interact with other people would likely give up email altogether.

More than useful, email is powerful, like fire or guns. Used carefully, it’s a tool of impressive leverage. Misapplied it can wreck careers and relationships. It can be an intimate one-to-one thing, or it can be a broadcast medium to an entire organization. Email together with the hypertext and the browser spurred the PC industry to the point where computers became as ubiquitous as television and hi-fi sets. Email has amplified the communication capabilities for people with disabilities.

My first email arrived sometime in the mid 1980s, when a slow-moving company I worked for installed Novell Netware to network its PCs and deployed email clients. The IT guy sent me this message: “Are we having fun yet?”

So ubiquitous has email become we’re generally unconscious of it, even as we tap away all day and sometimes grouse about it. On the passing of its progenitor, let’s take a moment to contemplate this world-changing technology. Here’s @ you, Ray.

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