> Thee very first email has been lost to time. As he said in an NPR interview from 2009, they were just random strings of text.

As usual, technical people easily miss the marketing value of sound bites. He should have invented a clever and catchy story about the first email.

Technical people will immediately say that you can't do that because that would a lie, forgetting the thousand "lies" that we are all complicit in (Santa Claus, tooth fairy, "your tie/haircut looks nice", "sorry, I don't have any change to give you").

EBay founder Omidyar said that eBay was invented to trade Pez dispensers, a story he's now admitted is completely false, but no one seems to be too worked up over that. Apparently Omidyar understands the difference between a lie (has an actual negative effect on someone) and marketing fluff (makes for an interesting story but is just trivia).

For such an influential person--in the sense that he had a huge impact on the world--Tomlinson is completely unknown. I'm guessing that his financial reward for inventing email was essentially nothing as well.