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MIT Lecturer Defends His Standing As Email Inventor
hapworth writes "IT professionals were recently outraged to hear that the Smithsonian acquired some code from MIT lecturer VA Shiva Ayyadurai who has convinced no less august pubs than Time Magazine and The Washington Post that he invented email. While objectors howl on forums and message boards, VA Shiva Ayyadurai spoke up today to defend his standing as email's creator, claiming he doesn't regret not patenting it because he doesn't believe in software patents."
and Ray used it to send e-mail between different machines in 1971 on the ARPANET. How this 1978 guy's claim has any legs I don't get.
I was referring to Unix-style email, which is the granddaddy of most the email passed around today. By 1973 there was RFC 561, which was, so far as I'm aware the first description of a proper ARPANET text message.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#Email_claims
1) He did not invent it.
2) He did copyright the term "EMAIL" in 1982.
3) But he doesn't believe in software patents.
Now he is trying to twist his "copyright on "EMAIL"" into "Invention of EMAIL" with nothing more than his own words.
Wake me up when Dennis Ritchie returns to whoop his undeserving ass...
Actually it mentions the 1978 DEC marketing message (a fairly well-known event) in line with an earlier 1971 war protest message. The 1978 date was the first commercial spam. I guess we might use a different term for it today, but it was definitely unsolicited.
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His name is on three separate patents; are these "software patents?" (Presumably he has had a change of mind.)
6,718,368 System and method for content-sensitive automatic reply message generation for text-based asynchronous communications
6,718,367 Filter for modeling system and method for handling and routing of text-based asynchronous communications
6,668,281 Relationship management system and method using asynchronous electronic messaging
Source: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=in%2FShiva+and+in%2FAyyadurai+&d=PTXT>
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
Ayyadurai may have been the first person to use the term "email".
Nope; that was probably BBN Mercury in 1965. Every important component to e-mail can be found by that year; that page even specifically debunks this bozo at the top. Like a lot of things, the minute electronic mail became feasible to build, e-mail was built by multiple people. All the requirements were in place the minute a community of people on time-shared computers existed. The number of independent creations of the same thing during a short time period show it was really an obvious next step the minute two people could use the same computer.
This NYTArticle from April 28, 1957 says:
Mail Sped by Electronics Predicted by Summerfield; One-Day Delivery Sought Between Any 2 Cities --Many 'Ifs' in Plan ELECTRONIC MAIL SEEN IN A DECADE Senate to Study Bill Full Report Planned 'Pattern' for Country Fire From Two Sides Question of 'Intangibles'
WASHINGTON, April 27--The Post Office Department envisions a five-to-ten-year transition to the electronic age...
BCC was present in RFC680, from 1975. The Unix V6 mail program didn't explicitly have mail folders, but from what I can tell of the man page for the Unix V6 mail command ( http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/mail ), the notion that mail could stored somewhere other than the .mail file in the home directory did exist in 1975. The Unix V7 mail command (you can find its man page at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol1.pdf on page 112) most certainly does support saving mail to multiple mailbox files (and what is an mbox file but a bloody folder, which is essentially what Thunderbird still uses with an additional index file). It's that basic multiple mbox structure that programs like Elm and Pine would ultimately build on top of. MH that appears to be from around 1979 also handles multiple mail folders.
So no, the guy didn't invent bcc or multiple mail folders either. He didn't invent the first GUI mail system, which was probably Xerox's Laurel.
The guy is a liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
He is playing a ridiculous semantic game. If you look at his website, he never claims to have invented "email". He claims only to have invented "EMAIL", which is technically correct, in that he did create a program called "EMAIL". He even goes so far as to admit that the word "email" was in use previously, but that he was the first to use the word "EMAIL".
He's a tool, and his website makes it obvious.
"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." -- Albert Einstein