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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.'"
Hack like Chomsky? Really? He reinvented linguistics. His influences reach out from compilers to AI to psychology. Hack? Don't judge the man by (your opinion of) his political views.
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.
My problem with this specific claim is that Chomsky was around and most certainly must have been using Unix-based mail systems before this twerp developed his little system (that had no influence on the history of email itself). I can't understand where Chomsky is coming from on this. The guy didn't invent email, not even by the definition that Chomsky himself provides. He developed an independent system that seems not at all rooted in the considerable work done over the seven or eight previous years nor did it in any way influence the later development of later email systems. There were no lack of alternative email systems, and Exchange-Outlook are Lotus Notes are based on such systems out of the late 1970s and the 1980s, but the king of them all, SMTP transmitting mbox-structured email, can be directly linked back to the mail command to be found in the first version of Unix. There is a clear genealogy, and that even goes back into the 1960s with Multics. The RFCs are all there, hard proof that this guy did not invent some routed multi-organizational email system, that in fact, academia and the US government had been using such a system, which is the direct ancestor of Internet mail we use today. Hell, by the mid-1970s we had RFCs relating to the mbox format that made an mbox format that pretty much every mail program out there today could open.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If he's still claiming that, then he's still a liar. What could be more inter-organizational than the ARPANet mail system that by 1975 was transmitting mail between US government agencies and academia throughout the US, Canada and Western Europe? The RFCs are there to prove it. ARPANet was distributing email to various organizations and agencies four or five years before this idiot's email program was written.
The guy is full of shit. He's a liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.