Internet pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who is credited with the invention of email has died at the age of 74, he died on Saturday morning.

The  US computer programmer came up with the idea of electronic messages that could be sent from one network to another in 1971. His invention included the ground-breaking use of the @ symbol in email addresses, which is now standard.

Ray Tomlinson, earned a bachelor of science in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1963 and a master’s in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965, where he worked on speech synthesis. In 2012, Tomlinson was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society