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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."
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Which he didn't. The ancestor of the mail systems used on the Internet today was the mail command from the original versions of Unix, way back around 1971 or so. This guy is either a lunatic or a liar, but the one thing he isn't is the inventor of email.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
CTSS had email before UNIX did - 1964, if I recall.
Dude, you're talking about the mail command versus email -- E mail! Don't you know that if you take something that already exists and put an e or an i in front of it, it's completely new computer wizardry? The entire USPTO is based around this concept. Anyone with a UID of fewer than seven figures should know this stuff.
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.
From TFA: VA Shiva Ayyadurai claims is to have created the first "graphical front end for an electronic mail system", and was the first to copyright the term "EMAIL".
It is the craziness of the mass media that translates a copyright filing as "Invention".
Thirty four characters live here.
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...
Even if he is the first to use the term "email" (which I don't believe), electronic mail messages that even a modern email user would recognize had been in use for the better part of seven years by 1978. The guy is a liar, and he's trying to cover it up with clever semantics games. One can trace the evolution of modern email systems with trivial ease from the Unix version 1 mail command through the RFCs detailing out header formats, message body encoding, UUCP and SMTP transmission protocols right up to RFC2822 in 2001. I don't see this asshat's name on any of the RFCs or as an author of any of the mail variants. He's a liar, or nuts. In either case, if I was MIT, I'd be looking at giving this moron his walking papers.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
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