He attended the Broadalbin Central School in nearby Broadalbin, New York. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York where he participated in the co-op program with IBM. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer in 1963. After graduating from RPI, he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to continue his electrical engineering education. At MIT, Tomlinson worked in the Speech Communication Group and developed an analog-digital hybrid speech synthesizer as the subject of his Master's thesis. He received a S.M. in Electrical Engineering degree in 1965.
In 1967 he joined the technology company of Bolt Beranek and Newman where he helped develop the TENEX operating system including ARPANET Network Control Protocol and implementations. He wrote a file-transfer program called CPYNET to transfer files through the ARPANET. Tomlinson was asked to change a program called SNDMSG, which sent messages to other users of a time-sharing computer, to run on TENEX. He added code he took from CPYNET to SNDMSG so messages could be sent to users on other computers — the first email.
Raymond Samuel Tomlinson implemented an email system in 1971. It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to he ARPAnet (previously, mail could only be sent to others who used the same computer). 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 sent by him is not preserved and had content he describes as insignificant, something like "QWERTYUIOP". This is commonly misquoted as "The first e-mail was QWERTYUIOP". At first, his email messaging system wasn't thought to be a big deal. When Tomlinson showed it to a colleague he said "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."
