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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.'"
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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/
A person can be grand at some tasks, like re-inventing linguistics, and a hack in other areas, like pontificating on politics.
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
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.