Slashdot Mirror
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."
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
If only the rest of the world saw it his way. If he did invent email, that is.
I'd love to test our Social Networking application we ran in college, long before this interweb thing came along, against some of the patents people are claiming now.
As for email, I've got junk from my Dad's Model 14 Teletype, with headers and all, which could certainly pass for early email. Back then it was passed between stations until intended recipient was expected to have received it - your TTY was always expected to be left on.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
When I got to MIT in 1979 email had been in use for a long time. Both " at " and "@" were in equal use on ITS to send mail over ARPAnet via NCP. I'm not sure what this guy is claiming about having invented email in 1980.
Many DIFFERENT items go into a modern email system.
Tomlinson "invented" the practice of using the @ sign.
Ayyadurai may have been the first person to use the term "email".
But there is no evidence that he invented the concept of electronic messages between people.
What is email? It isn't a protocol - you can send it over many, many protocols. It is a concept: The very idea of sending a text message by electronic means to be stored somewhere the recipient may access it for a non-realtime conversation. What is that, really? It's the telegraph. Computers made it much faster, cheaper and more accessible, but the real core of the idea is as old as the telegraph.
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...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network
http://jproc.ca/crypto/autodin.html
I managed a few Technical Control sites long ago. We could route normal telegrams on the system with a little creative address routing.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
He seems to be using a variant of the "big lie" wrapping some pieces of truth in the bigger lie. He does appear to have a valid copyright registration for a computer program entitled "EMAIL." from 1982. He's then taking advantage of the mainstream press' unfamiliarity with copyrights vs trademarks vs patents AND their unfamiliarity with software technology--or even willingness to read something as basic as the wikipedia entry for email to realize that 1982 was late to the party and at best the guy did develop a neat computer program at a young age, but certainly is in no way is the inventor of email as a technology. Shame on the media as much as on him.
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...
As it happens, I actually knew Shiva in high school (I was one year behind him in Livingston -- class of 1982; he was class of 1981). We lived about 1/4 mile apart, and took the same bus to and from school. We were both science/math geeks.
I do remember (not the details) the project he's talking about. We discussed it on the bus. He did indeed submit it to the Westinghouse Talent Search, and as I recall he got past the first round. It certainly was an interesting project for the time, and my recollection is that he designed it very well and he well deserved to advance. I don't know one way or the other whether he came up with it independently, but he most certainly didn't invent email.
It has been well over a decade since I last saw him.
As he says on his Web site, he's the "inventor of EMAIL".
He does not, however, say he's the inventor of email or e-mail or electronic mail, so I guess he means he's the inventor of a system named "EMAIL". the copyright he got was for a "COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR Electronic Mail System", which suggests that "EMAIL" was a program that implemented, err, umm, email.
He als says "Every software system needs a User's Manual, so did the world's first E-MAIL system. At that time, Shiva was everything on the project: software engineer, network manager, project manager, architect, quality assurance AND technical writer.", so maybe "the world's first E-MAIL system" was the first system that "handled it all" - ARPANET e-mail involved different mail user agents and mail transfer agents on different operating systems, so there wasn't a single "COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR Electronic Mail System".
Or not. A historical overview of the CTSS system, from its fiftieth anniversary, quotes Tom Van Vleck (also cited in another posting):
Reference 11 is to Van Vleck's The History of Electronic Mail (which mentions the copyrighting of "EMAIL" in a parenthetical note at the top of the page) and Errol Morris's New York Times Opinionator blog post "Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?" (my head asplode when I learned that Errol Morris was Noel Morris' brother).
The news article he cites says he "created an electronic mail system", which may well be the case. It doesn't say he created the first electronic mail system, and "created an electronic mail system" suggests that the notion of an "electronic mail system" wasn't a Shiny New Idea (and, in fact, it wasn't).
And, in fact, the article to which the "to defend his standing as email's creator" link takes you quotes him as saying "I did not claim that I created electronic communications," so at least give him credit for that.
The real beginning of email, in the sense of fully automatic message switching, was "Western Union Plan 55-A", introduced in 1948 and shut down in 1976. Imagine Sendmail, with paper tape punches and readers with bins between them as the buffers. Such systems handled most telegrams in the US for over 25 years.
There were message switching systems before that, but Plan 55-A was the first one that could forward a message from source to destination without human intervention at the switching points. It could even handle messages with multiple destination addresses.
Before that, there were teletypewriter exchanges, but they involved dialing up a connection directly between sender and receiver. They were basically telephone switches repurposed for teletypes. That's what TWX and Telex were. Those were automatic dial back to the early 1930s.