11 Geek Visionaries Who Created Technology We Can't Live Without

Can't imagine life without e-mail, your cell phone, and the Internet? Luckily, these technology visionaries couldn't either.

By Diann Daniel

Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that people often don't know what they want until you show them. Today, it's impossible to imagine life without an iPod or a cell phone, but there was a time when the technologies we depend on so heavily didn't even exist. Except in the minds of visionaries.

Like much in life, new technology is often a team effort and it's difficult to point to just one person as "responsible." Still, we're calling out a few folks who were instrumental in creating technology that today, we can't imagine living without.

By the way, we'll feature Linus Torvalds and some more tech innovators in an upcoming slideshow. In the meantime, we'd like to hear from you: Which other visionaries have created or furthered the technology that made the greatest impact on our lives?

Ray Tomlinson: E-mail

Thank Ray Tomlinson for the plethora of e-mails you get every day. He created a way to send electronic mail over a network in 1971, "mostly because it seemed like a neat idea." Tomlinson is also responsible for the @ sign in e-mail. He chose to combine the user and host names divided by the @ sign (user@host) that is the standard for e-mail addresses to this day.

Image credit: BBN Technologies

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