Albany Siyum Launches Digital Torah Solution

At Albany’s communal Siyum, Rabbi Yisroel Rubin introduced futuristic Halachic research on Digital communications, suggesting that Digital fluidity may be the ideal medium to expand and broadcast Oral Torah.

The new concept reflects Albany’s Maimonides School emphasis on integrating Torah with Technology. Nearby Troy Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute alumni Ray Tomlinson first invented the @ email exchange in 1971.

Ray Tomlinson’s message put “@” on the map

It was 1971, and in a windowless room in Cambridge, RPI alumni Ray Tomlinson was hunched over two massive computers, struggling to send the world’s first email. He had been programming and debugging for hours, trying fruitlessly to get a message from one cabinet-sized computer to another.

He tried again, banging out his name on a teletype keyboard: TOMLINSON. He followed that with an @ symbol – a little-used key he had chosen as a separator – and then the name of the other computer. Tomlinson rolled his chair over to the second computer’s teletype and banged out TYPE MAILBOX on the keyboard.

For a moment there was silence. Then with a rattle, the teletype came alive. History’s first email had arrived.

“The mail was sitting there just like it is today when you check your inbox,” Tomlinson said.

The Internet Society inducted Tomlinson, now an engineer for Raytheon, into the Internet Hall of Fame in Geneva, Switzerland. He joins 32 other Internet luminaries in the Hall of Fame’s first class.

The Internet Society recently inducted Tomlinson into the Internet Hall of Fame.

Forty-one years after Tomlinson’s first message, some 300 billion emails are sent daily, each of them using the “@” address format he invented.

At the time Tomlinson was a 30-year-old computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, which later became Raytheon BBN Technologies. He and other BBN engineers helped write the Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, the core software used to send information through the Internet.

Tomlinson’s first email only traveled 100 yards – from a computer known as BBN-TENEXB to a router elsewhere in the building, then back to the second computer, BBN-TENEXA. But it was the first time a message had traveled between completely different computers on the ARPANET, the predecessor of the Internet.

The achievement seemed so routine that no one, not even Tomlinson, can remember the exact day it happened, or even the content of the message.

“Every time I tested I typed in something – `testing 123’ or something innocuous like that – and then I would send it and see what happened,” Tomlinson said. After dozens of tries, he said, one message came through.

“There was nothing momentous about it,” Tomlinson said.

A few days later Tomlinson sent the first lengthy email: a memo to other workers at BBN on how to use the @ symbol to send emails outside the company. There was only one problem: other than BBN, nobody else had the software to receive them yet.

“It was kind of like the sound of one hand clapping,” Tomlinson said. “There was nobody to talk to out there.”

Tomlinson has since worked on dozens of other projects, from wearable computers for soldiers to training software for Navy sailors. He now works on Raytheon software that the military uses to plan the movement of supplies around the world.

But Tomlinson remains most famous for email and rescuing the @ sign from obscurity, and he cheerfully signs his name as R@y when asked for autographs.

“The Internet Society is the center of the Internet’s development,” Tomlinson said. “So I’m particularly proud of the fact that they are seeing fit to establish this Hall of Fame and have chosen me as one of their initial members.”

Where It’s @t!

The reclusive @ once sat in the corner figuring costs per item or lb. Its peers pushed ahead to become Capitals, but little @ remained inside its circle no matter how things shifted. Capitalizing on their height and stature, the arrogant key characters ridiculed @’s hunched curvature and isolated lifestyle.

Lo and behold, @ arose from a grocer’s scribble to the epicenter of global communications. Even as mailmen plod thru rain & snow, @ delivers at the mere tap of a finger. Redefining time and space, @’s domain now supersedes borders & boundaries, encompassing attitudes and latitudes around the world.

“I am in the West, but my heart is in the East.” Although distant in space, we are only a heartbeat away from encircled Isr@el, yearning for peace and Redemption when “Israel will be a Light onto the nations.” (Isaiah 60:3)