'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.'"

Comments

Ask a better question

[jmorris42]

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.

Re:Ask a better question

[MightyMartian]

Chomsky ought to know better, he was certainly an academic in the early 1970s. At any rate, the mail command dates back to 1970-71 and there is a very early RFC detailing an email system. Certainly by 1974-75 the earliest format of what we now call the mbox format was in existence, as was the transport system. This guy created an email system, but his system has nothing to do with the Unix mail system that predates it by several years, and is the progenitor of the UUCP/SMTP systems in place by the mid to late 1970s that were used to broadcast mbox-formatted emails to various organizations.

In short, this guy's email system was neither the first, nor did it have any influence on the Internet's email system. The claim is pure rubbish. For once I wish I was a subscriber because I actually did a detailed investigation of the various RFCs surrounding Unix mail and demonstrated that the guy is full of crap.

Re:Ask a better question

[vlm]

I think the guy is trying to use the evidence that he wrote yet-another-stand-alone electronic mail system (nothing new at the time) and named one subroutine email, therefore he invented the term email. Then there's massive water muddying trying to extend being the first to use that word into inventing the current worldwide internet email system and extending into inventing the very concept of email and extending into inventing email programs as a concept. A pretty big stretch.

I'm not sure that naming my stereo amplifier that I built with radio shack parts in 1985 the "iPod", because the stringy wiring reminds me of a bean, necessarily means I invented your ipod touch, or I invented the concept of a mp3 player, I'm not even sure if using the name first is all that relevant other than as a trivia question. Going into full blown PR mode with the PR message being "I invented the ipod in 1985" is more than a bit irresponsible. Just for the record I did build a amp out of radio shack parts more or less of my own design, and it worked at least for awhile, but I never gave it a cool trendy name. Should have named it "facebook".

Re:Ask a better question

[xevioso]

Maybe he means the hack Noam "I don't believe Osamam Bin Laden was involved in 9/11" Chomsky?

Or maybe he means the hack who said "Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”.

Probably that hack.

http://www.guernicamag.com/blog/noam_chomsky_my_reaction_to_os/

Re:Ask a better question

[xevioso]

A person can be grand at some tasks, like re-inventing linguistics, and a hack in other areas, like pontificating on politics.

Re:Ask a better question

[MightyMartian]

To be clear, Tomlinson himself would never make the claim he invented email, e-mail, electronic mail or whatever. What he did was to extend the

mail

and underlying infrastructure to allow the routing of messages based upon whether the recipient was on the local host or on an external host. Email systems most certainly predated his work, and I suspect that you will even find routed electronic mail systems existed before (certainly Telix would fit that category).

Tomlinson is noted because he extended the mail system which had its origins in Multics (functionality was duplicated in Unix) to encompass ARPANet. Later work also allowed mail to be routed via other transmission channels; most famously UUCP and its (in)famous bang paths, which also predate 1978. In fact, by the mid-1970s the technical specifications were at a level that you could open up a copy of email from that period in Alpine or Thunderbird and it would handle it correctly. By the mid-1970s the mail systems available in Unix and ARPANet-capable systems was sufficiently evolved that one could send email from any compatible node (whether ARPANet, UUCP or some other facility) and delivery to other institutions or agencies, both in the US and abroad, was being done.

This history is also nicely documented by the RFCs themselves, you can see the evolution of the Internet mail transit systems from the early Multics and Unix local system only variants all the way to fully routed email by 1973, with improvements after that in the structure of the mbox format itself and in the transmission protocols. This Shiva fellow had absolute nothing to do with any of it. He was not a developer of any of the principle technologies, he was not an author of any of the RFCs, his system did not come into any kind of general use, and even by the early 1980s with the first major BBSs like CompuServe to come online, they all used their own electronic mail systems, while ARPANet continued to grow and the email infrastructure, daemons and clients along with it. His software is a little (actually, until he got busted making absurd claims, pretty much unknown) dead end variant on a concept that dates back a couple of decades before he wrote it.

Re:Ask a better question

[Anonymous Coward]

Kinda like Paul Krugman, then.

Oh lord, breaking out the one man reductio ad absurdum machine. If you don't like what he's writing, read something else he's written. In almost every case he's directly contradicted himself.

As for Noam, he should stick with the linguistics. He's actually good at that. He makes the mistake that because he is very knowledgeable about a particular subject, he thinks he must be an expert at everything in the entire world.

Re:Ask a better question

[Anonymous Coward]

He is saying quite clearly in that article that the evidence the United States government had of Bin Laden's involvement in 9/11 did not meet the standards required for the imposition of the death penalty by a court of law. They may have had a reasonable belief that he was responsible, but that is not the same thing.

And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

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.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[Anonymous Coward]

And these are Chomsky critics in a nutshell. They don't /have/ to disprove anything based on a genuine analysis of the facts, they just have to mention that he's "a brilliant linguistic, and has therefore convinced himself he's an expert on everything", point to the fact his conclusions are /far/ away from the mainstream, and the average person has, without ever seeing a valid examination, been convinced that he's just an old crackpot.

Maybe he's wrong on this claim. It doesn't seem anyone here is convinced. Fine: but people want to drag in the kitchen sink and attack Chomsky on other ideas, such as his ideas about politics, and compare it to people who have made unscientific claims about other things. That's intellectually disingenuous.

First of all, the ideas of Linus Pauling and Kary Mullis are disproved by the peer-reviewed scientific literature, whereas no such thing exists for /political/ narratives. Comparing Chomsky's political ideas to the ideas of these two is baseless, aside from even the fact they have nothing to do with one another. Second of all, if you want to convince people that Chomsky is wrong on any subject pertaining to politics, you have to break out the facts and the history and actually do it properly. I've seen plenty of people who tried to do exactly that, and tried their best to make a good case based on their reading of the facts. And I've debated those people. I can't debate you because you haven't tried to make a case that people can analyze.

I'm really tired of this sort of thing, I am. About 90% of the people who don't like Chomsky's political views don't even bother trying to do the hard work of disproving him using the historical or diplomatic record. Here's a little exercise: go on Youtube, search for his name, and watch him speak in a couple of videos. Now come back here and tell me: is this a man who's so blatantly unscientific and incoherent that he can be dismissed without even trying? There is a reason why he's one of the most quoted living persons and considered to be one of the world's leading intellectuals and political activists.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

And yet, histpry shows that when government gets greater control, humanity suffers far more than at the hands of "evil" corporations.

No corporation can force you to buy their product, unlike governments, or government-corporate partnerships, the latter of which only arise in populist response to political demagoguery from the left.

"Prove it?" Sure. look around you at the past 150 years of human history.