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'Inventor of Email' Gets Support of Noam Chomsky
Ian Lamont writes "Shiva Ayyadurai, who famously claims to have invented email as a teenager in the 1970s, is back. A statement attributed to Noam Chomsky offers support for Ayyadurai's claim while attacking 'industry insiders' for stating otherwise. The statement reads: 'Given the term email was not used prior to 1978, and there was no intention to emulate "...a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system," as late as December 1977, there is no controversy here, except the one created by industry insiders, who have a vested interest to protect a false branding that BBN is the "inventor of email," which the facts obliterate.'"
What exactly was there to 'invent' here? Once you conect two computers to each other sending messages is one of the most obvious uses for the ability; probably occuring within seconds of the notion of transferring documents/files. So the name is the claimed invention? The self evident name will be "electronic mail" or some variation in any English speaking country, which all the early networking research was done in. So what is left, the next obvious step of a easier to say/write contraction to 'email'?
Bah. Just having a hack like Chomsky's name attached speaks volumes. Nothing to see here, move along. Nonstory.
Democrat delenda est
The government would sue him for the word "mail"
Apple would sue him for adding a letter to the start of an already existing word.
You see this pretty often when someone is very smart and makes revolutionary discoveries in their own field. They essentially convince themselves that they are an expert on everything and have opinions worth having about everything. In the case of the Chomsky that's gotten also wound up in his politics and apparent desire for counter-narratives to standard histories especially when the standard versions are primarily about white Westerners. This isn't that dissimilar to how Linus Pauling developed weird ideas about vitamin C, or how Kary Mullis has decided that global warming is a hoax, that ozone depletion is a hoax, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that the Fed Reserve is part of a big conspiracy, and a few other strange ideas besides. None of this should be taken to diminish Chomsky's work in linguistics which was altogether very impressive.
When I started at DEC in 1980 we had a PDP-11 running DEC Standard Mumps that had a program that did email. I believe it was actually called "email" too.
It was not new at the time.
Most of my immediate rants are captured already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#Email_claims
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
It's ridiculous for Chomsky to say only "industry insiders" care about this, and that the reason is they're looking to protect BBN. That is a complete falsehood! The loudest voices speaking against Ayyadurai are from the Society for the History of Technology's Special Interest Group for Computers, Internet, and Society. "SIGCIS" as it's known is the world's leading body of historians in the computer field. (It is not an "Internet cabal" as Boston Magazine recently claimed.) I'm a member; as serious historians the only thing SIGCIS is looking to "protect" is historical context.
Who the F is Norm Chomsky, and why should I care what he says?
I can remember back to when I was in college in the early '70s using the mail system on the campus' TOPS-10 system. It wasn't called email, but people today would recognize as such, down to the resemblance to pine's interface.
All TFA says is V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai wrote a program called "EMAIL" and registered a copyright for it. There is not even a claim that it was actually tried out over a network, or a discussion of how the protocol worked or how it would scale.
Certainly this does make clear that "email" was not a totally original idea when BBN "invented" it, but neither was the light bulb original when Edison invented it. There is a certain value to making something actually work. (And yes, I know Edison was a douchebag. He still invented the light bulb, dammit!)
If it's any consolation, BBN made as much money off licensing their e-mail technology as Ayyadurai did: zero. This was back in the days when researchers shared their work. Contrast with how today's technology companies behave with respect to intellectual property and you'll see why I think Chomsky's denunciation of BBN is a bit overblown.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
You mean someone you don't agree with and you consider "dangerous." And you ridicule him as a "hack" because you don't like his politics even though he is an undeniably great linguist.
Thanks for clarifying.
who invented Noam Chomsky?
I mean as some sort of authority figure
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the Ayn Rand of the Left.
He's spun his notoriety/fame form one specific field into being a 'Guru' to a legion of followers who don't _think_ independently about what he pontificates.
SIGH :(
Remember Alice in wonderland? ...`Or else it doesn't, you know. The name of the song is called "Haddocks' Eyes."'
`Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?' Alice said, trying to feel interested.
`No, you don't understand,' the Knight said, looking a little vexed. `That's what the name is called. The name really is "The Aged Aged Man."'
`Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called"?' Alice corrected herself.
`No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called "Ways and Means": but that's only what it's called, you know!'
`Well, what is the song, then?' said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.
Mr. Ayyadurai is the inventor of "email" ( a computer program) and may be the inventor of "email" (the word used today to describe electronic massages) but he is not the inventor of email (the concept and protocol of sending electronic messages). Mr Ayyadurai does not explicitely claim to have invented it, I believe, but he is guilty of making his claim murky enough so that people will THINK this is what he is claiming.
Rock star Bono has lent his support to the patent claim.
Because, you know, he's a star!
A pox on web designers who feel that window.innerWidth == screen.availWidth
not that he invented the concept of mail-like electronic messaging, that goes back to the 1960's. The 60's were before my time, but I was using the ARPAnet in the late 1970's, I used the MAIL and MM programs all the time, they were called "mail" or sometimes even "electronic mail", but the term "email" (at first usually hyphenated as "e-mail") didn't become widespread til the 80's and seemed like an annoying neologism to me at that time. I think sometime in the 1980's, Donald Knuth published something urging people to leave out the hyphen, and that is about when I got comfortable with the term.
That website of his (which makes some pretty ridiculous claims) has a public comments section. Disqus is an option for sign-in.
Noam Chomsky and the linked website go out of the way to not mention Ray Tomlinson. Mr Chomsky does not compare Tomlinson's program from 1971 to Ayyadurai's program in 1977. A real argument would go feature by feature and explain what was present and what was missing. Instead Chomsky pretends Tomlinson doesn't exist. The linked site http://www.inventorofemail.com/ even has the gall to refer to Tomlinson as a mascot instead of using his name. All evidense is hand waved away with no explanation. Why do the RFC not count? No explanation. For some reason Chomsky is hung up on what the program is named. Suddendly naming your invention in english is important.
I don't usually start my own threads but I just want this comment to stand alone....
Who the fuck cares who invented email?!! This guy is pretty obviously a nut. I mean come on how full of yourself do you actually have to be to register inventorofemail.com
In one of his screeds, Shiva sort of brags that because the crappy computer that Rutgers Med, er, UMDNJ was using only supported 5-character program names, he came up with the name "EMAIL" in order to fit. Electronic mal was already commonplace, though not a consumer product yet, and not something the Livingston schools routinely used.
But claiming credit for being first to use an abbreviated name is not the same as inventing it. Recall that "Saturday Night Live" was originally the Howard Cosell variety show that ran at 10:00 on ABC. It lasted a few weeks. NBC Saturday Night made fun of it, but years after Cosell's show was gone and forgotten, it formally adopted its name, which people had been calling it all along.
Chomsky is confused. Every hacker, and computer geek knows, or at least should know, that this guy is a lier. I'd hardly call the opinions of the average Slashdotter the opinion of an Industry Insider. More like Industry Anarchist.
Linguistics. Chomsky is a genius in the field on linguistics. His more famous role, that of the wise sage explaining propaganda and power politics, doesn't withstand intellectual review. His books on world affairs are full of references within references within references that invariably end up pointing to something he has said before as his "source!" His work on "propaganda" and the media is largely plagiarized from real thinkers in that regard like Ellul. If he is talking about linguistics then I am all ears, when he is talking about things outside that sphere he is simply another ideologue promoting his preferred system.
You're supposed to make one of those words link to a shock site, you know.
Which is par for the course. Chomsky's great linguistic contribution is that while humans have an innate language ability *AND* that only humans have this. The primate researchers named "Nim Chimpsky" in honor of this man, but in their research proved just how arrogant Chomsky was. Humans are not alone.
As for the topic at hand, Chomsky is confusing the idea of a Trademark of the word, "email", with that of a patentable idea. He talks patent, but the defense is based on the idea of the word "EMAIL" not having any etymology prior to Mr Ayyadurai. As a trademark, "EMAIL" might have had some meaning had any action been taken. I think it is a rather trivial exercise to show that Email has a long and well understood pedigree with the final core component falling into place in 1971. Any RFC's post that time represent enhancements to this core system. In no way is Mr. Ayyadurai's work "novel" and not an obvious state of the art, the core requirements for a patent.
It's one thing to coin a term and another to invent something. They are just different accomplishments. Maybe Shiva coined "EMAIL" independently, though it is rather certain that his coinage did not influence later use. But he did not invent the product. Likewise, a copyright is not about invention; it's about expression.
Commander Taco may have coined the term "slashdot", but he wasn't he first to slashdot something.
Thanks for articulating that very well. It actually takes some effort to analyze the facts and try to make a well reasoned argument. I guess that's why so many people take the easy way out to show themselves they are right, and just say something like "X is a crackpot, therefore don't listen to X".
Fred Hoyle was to astrophysics what Noam Chomsky is to linguistics.
Mail-from: BBN-TENEXA rcvd at 22-JUL-75 0617-PDT
Date: 22 JUL 1975 0904-EDT
Sender: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA
Subject: MSGGROUP# 099 The Attention Subfield in The MAILSYS Address Fields.
From: MOOERS at BBN-TENEXA
To: [ISI]Mailing.List:
Cc: HENDERSON, RBRACHMAN, ULMER
Message-ID:
Reference: Kirstein "The Attention Field", Msggroup #82.
Discussion of Kirstein's message of July 7.
The problem is that one MAILBOX sometimes serves a group of users
or projects. How can the messages, as they arrive, be brought to
the attention of different users? And how can they be sorted out
at a later date?
There are three ways that the current MAILSYS system can handle
this:
(1) Use the KEYWORDS field to store the appropriate keywords,
names, names of projects, or whatever.
The KEYWORDS field takes a text string as its argument. The idea
is that it will usually consist of words, separated by commas,
but this is not at all required.
Ex: KEYWORDS: WHATZIT, WHOSIS
The KEYWORDS field can be displayed in a long-form SURVEY with
the command
>SURVEY,(CR)
>>KEYWORDS (CR)
>>(CR)
If you wish to search the KEYWORDS field with a READ or SURVEY
command, you can first set up a FILTER:
>FILTER (CR)
>>REQUIRE KEYWORDS (CR)
>>(CR)
Then you can perform the sort and store the selected messages in
a file with
>READ,(CR)
>>FILTER (CR)
>>OUTPUT (CR)
>>(CR)
The commands can be typed in the abbreviated mode, of course.
(2) Use the "Attention Subfield" of the MAILSYS address fields
(TO, CC, and BCC).
As currently implemented, the MAILSYS address field has the form
= , , ...
where
= @ ()
which is displayed as
Name at Host (Attn: Text String)
Ex: Mooers at BBNA (Attn: WHATZIT)
Until now, the documentation of showed the form
= @ (, , ... )
and the idea was (and is) that in future versions of MAILSYS,
could be the primary user assigned to a multi-user
MAILBOX, and the names in the parentheses could be secondary
users authorized to use the MAILBOX. Whether the secondary users
should be assigned identities in the system so that MAILSYS can
parse and check them in -- at least in the local directory -- is
an interesting point for debate.
At present, the attention subfield is available for any kind of
flag. It has the advantage of being in the TO, CC, and BCC
fields, where you would normally look for an addressee, and the
disadvantage that MAILSYS can't sort on it.
In the address fields, MAILSYS will FILTER only for address lists
and will not touch the stuff inside the parentheses, whether it
consists of duly authorized names or not.
Future versions of MAILSYS will certainly have to filter and sort
on the Attention Subfields of messages.
(3) It is also possible to put the attention flag at the
beginning of the SUBJECT field, e.g.,
Ex: SUBJECT: WHATZIT: More thoughts on the Attention Problem.
Then you can search for WHATZIT with a FILTER.
This has the advantage that the attention flag shows up on a
normal short-form SURVEY, and the disavantage that the subject
field is, perhaps, not a very logical place for an attention
flag.
I hope this clarifies matters. I have changed the on-line
documentation to reflect the system as it is now.
---Charlotte
Shiva (who I assume is the AC here), some electronic mail systems in use prior to 1978 were far more advanced than "EMAIL" at UMDNJ ever was. Just because you didn't play with them at Livingston High doesn't mean that they weren't fully-functional interorganizational mail systems.
I've been ignoring Noam ever since he made public his horribly anti-Israel ideology.
Mail from USC-ISI rcvd at 8-APR-76 1202-PST
Date: 8 APR 1976 1110-PST
Sender: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI
Subject: MSGGROUP# 314 Welcome Richard Stallman (RMS@MIT-AI)
From: STEFFERUD at USC-ISI
To: [ISI]Mailing.List:
Message-ID:
Please add RMS@MIT-AI (Richard Stallman) to your MsgGroup mailing
list, or obtain a new copy form [ISI]Mailing.List;56.
Richard and Ken Harrenstien (KLH@MIT-AI) have been perusing the
MsgGroup Proceedings and have raised a number of issues that I
think are well worth discussion.
So, Welcome to MsgGroup. Enjoy. See you in the discussions,
Stef
Begin forwarded message
I sent my first e-mail in 1977 in college. We just didn't use that term for it. We called it "a message" for lack of a simpler term (though arguably "email" might be simpler for being shorter, but that name didn't enter the picture because we were not using postage stamps).
Basically, it was on the IBM mainframe running VM/CMS at our school. It was done in some simple batch scripts that accessed the punch card reader queues in each virtual machine (a login session created a virtual machine with ran a primitive OS called CMS). There were no domain names; just user names. And mostly it was all UPPER CASE EBCDIC although I did send lower case on it which worked fine on ASCII terminals and not on some 3270 terminals. There were no fancy RFC822 headers. Each "spool file" had metadata identifying the sending user and date/time. The "card format contents" was the message body.
If using the term "email" or "e-mail" or "mail" is required to qualify, then this didn't. If sending between different computers is required to qualify, then this didn't. But it did work for everyone who had a mainframe account, which was all faculty, staff, grad students, CS students, and everyone in a programming class that used the mainframe. And I never got spam.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The Invention of Email from Pretext Magazine (1998),
`Sometime in late 1971, a computer engineer named Ray Tomlinson sent the first e-mail message. "I sent a number of test messages to myself from one machine to the other," he recalls now. "The test messages were entirely forgettable. . . . Most likely the first message was QWERTYIOP or something similar."'
`It seems doubtful that "QWERTYIOP" will make it into the history books. And Tomlinson's name hardly lives in the public mind. When he is remembered at all, it is as the man who picked @ as the locator symbol in electronic addresses. In truth though, he is the inventor of e-mail, the application that launched the digital information revolution'
AccountKiller
There's a video interview with Shiva Ayyadurai available for those of you who can sit through a 30-second ad. There's nothing new in it that's not already been said. But it's interesting nevertheless. Incidentally, is he still a lecturer at MIT? His WP page (which comes across as a little too critical) states that his contract was not renewed.
Quillem : An India-centric mishmash of things.
I am the second Emperor of the United States, Norton II.
"What exactly was there to 'invent' here? Once you conect two computers to each other sending messages is one of the most obvious uses for the ability; probably occuring within seconds of the notion of transferring documents/files"
Such msgs were sent using UUCP and the !BANG path, as in machine1!machine2!machine3. A minor defect was that adding/deleting or moving a machine rendered the whole path invalid. That's why someone invented routers and DNS.
AccountKiller
...so I found an article on the history of Electronic Mail that names all of the relevant RFCs and their date of publication, beginning in 1972, with links:
http://www.livinginternet.com/e/ei.htm
Chomsky sucks at websearch... altho the crux of his argument is linguistic, where "email" was not in use before '81, and therefore Ayyadurai's innovation was a new contraction. I can see how that would be a big deal to a linguist - using "email" instead of "electronic mail" or "mail." It's an innovation of the profound nature of McDonald's coining the phrase "chicken nugget!" Before, we were adrift in a benighted age of the chicken crouquette.
Noam Chomsky, renowned internet expert.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think this has the cause and effect backwards. These people made revolutionary discoveries because they were self-confident, open to questioning basic assumptions, and willing to endure ridicule for proposing unconventional theories. People like this are wrong 99% of the time, but can make some really big breakthroughs the other 1% of the time.
All geniuses are heretics, but all heretics are not necessarily geniuses. He made no significant contribution to his own area of specialization. His body of work is seen as pedantic and derivative when it is not universally dismissed as simply being wrong. Sometimes the guy talking to God can actually part the Red Sea...but most of the guys talking to voices in their own head are not saints.
This is the problem with Chomsky -- people skim what he wrote, then pull out a couple quotes to "prove" whatever point they're trying to make.
In this case, you're making it sound like Chomsky is a "truther," which is pretty damn far from the case. Nowhere in that article (or any other, afaik) does he deny the connection between al Qaeda, Osama, and the 9/11 attacks.
He's simply explaining why he disagrees with the decision to execute bin Laden without a trial. Of course, if you'd bothered reading the article, you'd know that.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
You fail at reading comprehension.
Chomsky talks about the coinage of the word "email", not the invention of the technology.
The article is extensively and exclusively about how Ayyadurai ended up being the author of the word which the world has adopted to refer to the system which the world exchanges messages through electronic systems.
It's the word "email". The term "email. It's about the origin of the word.
Read the god-damned article for once in your life.
Does Fortran allow a hyphen in program names at that time? If not then you can't even say he dropped the hyphen.
---
I know this to be a fact because I was a user of $mail during that time period.
Shiva may have copyrighted the term "email" but he did not invent it!
It is reprehensible for Chomsky to try and reinforce the invention claim by twisting the copyright assertion using false logical arguments. Further, Chomsky's facts are missing/incomplete/wrong. His pronouncement is mere sophistry. In short, he is [has proven himself to be] a technical neophyte, and his opinion on technical matters should be regarded as such. Yet, he derides "industry insiders" (e.g. experts in computer programming) but fails to mention his own attempt at grandstanding.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
Chomsky appears to be talking solely about the origin of the WORD 'email' as it applies to enterprise-level communication systems, and pointing out that this guy used the word 'email' before BBN did.
This would be similar to correctly pointing out who came up with the word "television" - as opposed to who actually invented the first thing that was like television.
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
The score on this post, and the many comments below, help show the reality of the situation. Whether inventing something is merely documenting the implementation of an idea, or if it is creating an obscure implementation which is easily forgotten. Legally, it is merely documentation, and this idea seems to elude people.
The definition of "email" is a little vague, but for the analogy to snail mail to work, you just need two things:
1. Asynchronicity/persistence: the receiver doesn't have to interpret the message while the sender is sending it. A letter recipient doesn't have to be looking over the writer's shoulder while the letter is being written, compared to (non-recorded) verbal conversation where one person has to be listening at the same time that the other person is speaking.
2. Delivery: the message is moved from one location to another. A non-electronic example of a lack of delivery would be a post-it note.
Adding qualifiers like "full-scale" or "inter-organizational" and so forth is like saying the Wright Flyer wasn't an airplane because it didn't have an enclosed cockpit.
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
A friend of mine independently "invented" "email" in 1977 on our uni's Control Data Corporation Cyber 73 running Kronos. Each person wanting to be "in" the mail system created a publicly-accessible, "append-only" file called "MAIL", and other people wrote to it. (This was pre-spam). It wasn't elegant, but it worked.
It didn't seem like a big, earth-shaking, "Look, everyone, *I* did this *great thing*!" sort of invention.
I was going to say "That's nice, who cares?" but damn.
Chomsky is going to be very surprised in the morning when he finds so many /. tongues stuck up his ass.
Considering I don't know anything of him outside of his whack-a-doodle politics, I'm not very impressed about his relevance in other areas. And yes, I do read a lot in different areas. Flame on, once you're all done bobbing his knob.
Neither Chomsky or Ayyadurai seem to have heard of RFCs.
Specifically, what did he achieve? Most of the peer review that I've read was pretty dismissive of Chomsky's work.
Noam Chomsky simply rocks. My first encounter with Chomsky was in the late 80's in the pages of Maximum Rock and Roll. Then there were the supernumerary references in my cognitive science text book. Could it be the same guy? Is it possible that there are two different guys named Noam Chomsky? One, the fervent declaimer of American political interventionism and the other a pioneering linguist? Then again in my discrete math text book, on context-free grammars. Then I learned, yes it's the same Noam Chomsky. Here's the deal on Chomsky. Linguist or activist, Occupy or E-Mail, he's a truth teller. Plain and simple.
I hope that the statement that he has is in Chomsky Normal Form. Otherwise it is just another non-deterministic finite automaton.
Well there's an endorsement all but guaranteed to remove all credibility.
Grar II
I can disagree with the dating there. I started working for Honeywell Federal Systems Operations in Nov 1977 on a project at Rome Air Development Center (RADC) called NSW (National software works). At the time I joined the project, email was used to communicate among the many vendors working on NSW including HIS/FSO (me on Multics), UCLA (IBM 360), RADC (DEC-20 and Multics), MCA/Compass, BBN, MIT (while they participated), and the Air Force (contractor). This was over the Arpanet and I believe I got my first spam either in 1977 or 1978 ;) These days, NSW might be considered an early cloud project.
The addresses were in the same form as current addresses, user@machine (there were no domains yet so each machine had a unique name).