'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.'"

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[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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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[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.

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[ls671]

It is still nice to remember the old UUCP mail back in those days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#UUCP_for_mail_routing

I will let others debate who really invented email. You have a point there although...

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[OakDragon]

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.

Where did the OP mention anything about Chomsky's political views?

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[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".

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[Mindcontrolled]

Since no one in his right mind can call Chomsky a "hack" based on his achievements for linguistics, there's not much room left for speculations about the OP's motives for choosing this term, is there?

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[MightyMartian]

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.

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[jythie]

Obvious today, not so much at the time. Though I can not comment on this particular person's place in history, I can say that such things were not exactly obvious even once basic networking was in place, esp since the idea of 'sharing documents' was not there right out of the gate either.

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[jedidiah]

No. He didn't invent linguistics. He perhaps invented a naive approach to linguistics that only really makes sense when applied to machines.

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[jedidiah]

> He is claiming to have invented the first "full-scale, inter-organizational electronic mail system".

Nope. The OP covered that claim too.

Once you've got "intra-organizational" mail of any sort it's a pretty trivial step to generalize that to "inter-organizational" mail. Given the size of some organizations, that might already have occurred even a mail system that is only within a single organization.

The whole "intra" versus "inter" distinction is remarkably artificial.

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[OakDragon]

OP mentions it in his reply...

Which of course the AC could not see.

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[Mindcontrolled]

Since the OP clearly stated that Chomsky "reinvented" linguistics, you might want to keep in mind the extent of your own reading ability when you decide to call a certain linguistic viewpoint "naive" the next time.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I know who Russel and Whitehead were, I know who Chomsky is, and I am deeply acquainted with all their works, as befits an academic computer scientist.
As much as the discussion here has nothing to do with Chomsky's political views, it has nothing to do with Chomsky's academic work, either.
Specifically, the history and technical development of e-mail is not in Chomsky's domain of expertise as a linguist or a scientist; one does not award patents or copyrights by flipping through the OED.

Chomsky is, in this instance as he has been in many others, an academic bully swinging the credentials earned for past academic excellence like a hammer at anyone who dissents about anything.

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[MightyMartian]

ARPANet was connecting all kinds of organizations before 1978. It was inter-organizational at least four or five years before this guy wrote his "email" program.

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[Purity Of Essence]

I love Slashdot. Even when someone is right, they're wrong.

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[trb]

RFC 524 proposed a networked mail protocol in 1973. It notes that there was already a MAIL command for sending networked mail (on the ARPANET).

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc524

I agree that the guy's claim is dopey, and I'm not paying careful attention to Chomsky's claim, but I suspect that here he is playing some semantic game that he finds relevant in theory, but serves no useful purpose in fact.

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[SwedishPenguin]

If you read his works and though he was a Liberal then you clearly didn't actually understand his works and you wouldn't use the word "Libertarian" to describe Anarcho-capitalism. He describes himself as a Libertarian Socialist or Anarcho-syndicalist. Liberalism is about as far from that as you can come.

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[Eponymous Hero]

he's known for proving that language is innate in humans. it's a pretty big deal, unlike yourself.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Oh really? So circa 1979 on ARPANet you had a single program that contained all these features:

"defined user interface, database driven, inbox, outbox, drafts, address book, carbon copies, registered mail, and the ability to forward."

"As late as December 1977, Mr. David Crocker, one of Shiva's detractors, part of the ARPAnet coterie, clearly stated in a report he authored, "...no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system.""

Shiva is not claiming to have invented any individual feature. He is claiming to the first to integrate all the traditional components of a "full-scale, inter-organizational mail system" into a single electronic version.

It's not that hard to understand, but you keep wanting to put up and attack a straw man.

Show me another program from ~1979 with all the features available in his "EMAIL" program and I will believe you, but I have yet to find one.

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[MightyMartian]

The mail command, dating back to Multics (and god knows, probably older than that) was a functional mail system, so yes. As with all things Unix, it may not have been that pretty, but one could write an email and the mailer queue would sort out whether it was local delivery or was to be sent out via ARPANet (or possibly some other transmission method like UUCP, which also predates this guy's "all encompassing" mail program). He did not invent email, he did not invent the familiar structure of email (that was established in RFC by 1975), he did not invent a transmission system. He made his own email program that had no discernible adoption, was not the base of any other email technology. It was a dead end whose only notable feature was that it may be the first use of "EMAIL" (as opposed to electronic mail or e-mail, both of which can be found in reference to various other email systems in existence as far back as the 1960s).

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[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/

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[xevioso]

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

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[MightyMartian]

It would appear so. I'm sure if someone were to dig, they'd find emails Chomsky sent that predate this guy's "EMAIL" program

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[JustOK]

Yah, without Morse code, there would be no dot coms

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[ToadProphet]

"I don't believe Osamam Bin Laden was involved in 9/11"

Since you put that in quotes you are stating that's actually Chomsky's words. Source?

And PS, they didn't 'quickly learn that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda'. Otherwise, they could have provided conclusive evidence to the Taliban that Osama had in fact masterminded these attacks.

I don't follow conspiracy theory, but the fact is the evidence at the time was circumstantial at best.

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[Gilmoure]

*golf clap*

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[Chris Burke]

He made his own email program that had no discernible adoption, was not the base of any other email technology.

Which was good enough for me, especially back when I was a teenager, and doubly so if it was a new thing to me. No idea if this'd be the case for him, but it at least seems possible a teenager in the 70s wouldn't know about things running on ARPAnet; I know there was a lot of things I didn't have access to and thus didn't know about in the 80s that I 'reinvented'. Even if I did know of it, doing it myself was an accomplishment.

I guess what I'm saying is why isn't making a unique email system cool enough that they gotta add on that they invented email too.

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[MightyMartian]

He may not have known about ARPANet in 1978, but that does not excuse the bullshit he's been spreading in the last few years. The guy is a liar.

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[mounthood]

I'll try to summarize and address his argument. Please enlighten us with facts about the history of email. From the press release:

As late as December 1977, Mr. David Crocker, one of Shiva's detractors, part of the ARPAnet coterie, clearly stated in a report he authored, "...no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system." ...

Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today -- and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable.

So the argument is simple:
1. Give the definition of email as "the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today".
2. Cite the 1977 report as evidence that ARPAnet (et. al.) were not creating email (as defined.)
3. Conclude ARPAnet didn't invent email.

First, 'the email we all experience today' is not a technical descendant of Shiva's software. I don't know the facts of when early email became inter-organizational, but I do know that nobody decides who invented software by looking at who first had an idea or intention. The history of software invention always follows the technical history of the actual software under discussion, and the 'email we all experience today' clearly was not invented by Shiva. Most histories follow practice rather than who had the idea first, and (it seems to me) it's only when ideas are the same as practice -- or confused with it -- that this sort of argument is possible. (Who invented geometry? The first person to have the idea was also the first practitioner. Who invented speedboats? Whoever built them first, not whoever had the idea first. Do we say Leonardo Da Vinci invented the helicopter?)

Second, citing a paper as evidence of intention is almost meaningless in IT: software evolves and changes rapidly; it is viewed and used differently by different people at different times; ideas and intentions about future changes vary wildly. For those of us who've been around for the W3C this is obvious, but Chomsky seems to make a mistake only a scholar could make, that is, treating the written text as a reliable guide to the past. IT papers often have compromises and hedge phrases to keep participants happy by limiting the scope of work; this is why we have an HTML5 video tag but no codecs specified. If Chomsky wants to show that Shiva was the first to have the idea or intention to create email, it doesn't help to cite an earlier paper which includes that idea and makes a practical decision about not implementing it.

Third, there is overwhelming evidence that Shiva was not the first person to have the idea; electronic messaging systems existed before 1978. See Ray Tomlinson.

Lastly, if Chomsky only wants to show that Shiva was the inventor of the word "email" then he's done a real disservice to himself and those who respect his work, and should apologize and clarify his position. The title (the Terminology of "Email") and other parts seem to indicate that this is only a statement about the word, but the rhetoric of "industry insiders, who have a vested interest" doesn't seem to be a linguistic statement about etymology. So at best Chomsky could argue that Shiva was the first to combine the word "email" with the idea of an 'interoffice, inter-organizational mail system', but not that he was the inventor of the common software. Without taking a stand on the origination of the word, I would point out that this is not what's argued on the website.

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[sethmeisterg]

+1

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[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.

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[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.

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[HornWumpus]

People stupid enough to buy into his shit frighten me. In the context of the 20th century his political writings are jaw dropping.

Chomsky is the left's Shockley. Good at one thing. Uses that attention to prove he is an idiot.

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[retchdog]

more accurately, he says there wasn't, and still isn't, evidence of a legal standard that osama did 9/11, which is of course very different. chomsky's schtick is to generate propaganda mostly without explicit reference to "personal belief," which is partly why he is so effective as a propagandist. it also provides a convenient red flag for identifying right-wing hit pieces; if anyone says "chomsky said that he believes X," chances are good that it's a lie.

now, i personally think that chomsky is sort of pointlessly discrediting himself and the entire anti-war left by focusing on this detail which is of questionable importance, but i still don't feel the need to misrepresent him.

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[cartman]

Oh really? So circa 1979 on ARPANet you had a single program that contained all these features: "defined user interface, database driven, inbox, outbox, drafts, address book, carbon copies, registered mail, and the ability to forward."

Yes. Read the RFCs. There were outboxes, inboxes, address books, CC, BCC, forward, and so on. Whether it's database-driven or not is an irrelevant implementation detail (in fact it was, but this doesn't matter). It was already a finalized standard, and widely deployed before this guy did anything.

Bear in mind that RFCs finalize things that have been under discussion for years.

He is claiming to the first to integrate all the traditional components of a "full-scale, inter-organizational mail system" into a single electronic version.

No. All of these things were already integrated. The RFC from 1977 is already a fully-scale, inter-organization mail system in a single electronic version.

It's not that hard to understand, but you keep wanting to put up and attack a straw man.

wtf? The parent listed facts only (" 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."). That is not a straw man.

Show me another program from ~1979 with all the features available in his "EMAIL" program and I will believe you, but I have yet to find one.

Then you're not looking very hard.

Even if this guy had been the first person to conceive of some exact combination of features (cc, bcc, etc), that still wouldn't make him the inventor of email. The basic idea of asynchronous message transfer across networks with named user recipients and mailboxes and programs called "mail" etc, had been around for years already.

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[Anonymous Coward]

> The mail command, dating back to Multics (and god knows, probably older than that) was a functional mail system, so yes.

Now YOU are arguing semantics. Functional does not mean it incorporated all the features of Shiva's EMAIL program. According to Mr. David Crocker's own timeline for email development, some of these features existed but they appear to be very fragmented and spread across separate implementations. I don't see any mention of Inbox/Outbox/Draft mailboxes. I don't see any mention of address books. The old mail command I remember was very limited, but I was not personally using email until ~1982.

I'm not sure why you are so angry at Shiva, did he offend you personally or is there more to this story that is not in the media? It sounds like you have interacted with him directly?

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[HornWumpus]

Libertarian Socialist is simply nonsense, Socialist has strong state power included in the definition. How could a linguist use two such contradictory words together? Cognitive dissonance can be a bitch, I bet he doesn't even see his blind spot.

Anarcho-syndicists are just an old flavor of Marxist. I bet he doesn't admit this in 'mixed company'.

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[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.

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[j00r0m4nc3r]

except in soviet russia

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[cartman]

He is claiming to have invented the first "full-scale, inter-organizational electronic mail system".

He did not invent the first full-scale, inter-organizational mail system. There were already such systems in widespread use for years before this guy did anything.

Ignore the name "EMAIL" and instead call it "EMAILSYSTEM", maybe that will help you calm down and act in a reasonable manner.

Strange, because the exact spelling of the word "EMAIL" is probably the guy's only related invention. Insofar as I can tell, he was the first person to use the term "email" spelled without a hyphen ("e-mail"). I think this is his only invention. By telling us to ignore it, you are denying him even that.

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[jedidiah]

My "reading ability" doesn't alter the fact that Chomsky's work is far more relevant to machines than it is to actual real people and actual natural languages.

So the distinction between invention and reinvention is probably pretty meaningless.

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[trb]

The guy wrote a program called EMAIL, and he copyrighted the name EMAIL. If he wrote a program called FMAIL, he could have copyrighted the name FMAIL. That doesn't mean he invented anything or did anything innovative. Again, saying he "invented email" is silly.

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[EdIII]

I invented Facebook.

Happened when I was 9 years old and some dickhead was bullying a bunch of friends of mine. One of my friends played the part of bait and when the oaf came barreling around the corner he came to a violent halt when his face started to merge with a large dictionary.

Word for the day... Concussion.

Seriously though, it was a term for awhile. That dude got facebook'd.

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[cartman]

I used to have great respect for Chomsky, but any respect I had for him died many years ago. In this case his arguments are just totally idiotic, and beside the point. Most of his article revolves around the capitalization of the word email, which is not the main point. Then he produces a quotation ("...no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system") from a particular guy working on one exact mail program, and concludes that nobody in the world prior to 1978 was working on full-scale inter-organizational mail systems either. That argument is just a joke.

Chomsky says: "[These statements] suggest an effort to dismiss the fact that innovation can take place by anyone, in any place, at any time", but that is just a weak ad-hominem argument. Here Chomsky is speculating about what people who disagree with him are trying to do ("an effort to dismiss...") rather than dealing with evidence.

Chomsky just doesn't say anything relevant to the actual evidence in this case. Nor does he offer anything that approaches valid reasoning.

Then Chomsky says "the facts are indisputable", but in fact, Chomsky has not listed or touched upon any of the main facts about this issue. Before the guy invented anything, there were already widespread, inter-organizational, electronic mail systems which had address books, named recipients, mail boxes, mail programs, cc: and bcc: fields, and everything else essential. These systems were already integrated, inter-organization systems. These are the actual indisputable facts. This guy was not the inventor of email, and in fact, appears not to have invented anything significant related to it. The only invention that this guy deserves credit for is being the first person to spell email without a hyphen.

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[MightyMartian]

Larry Roberts developed a formalized email folder structure two years before this EMAIL program existed. Shiva didn't even invent that.

The reason I find Shiva repugnant is becausing he's a lying piece of shit, a fraud who tried to claim invention of email, then radically backpedalled, still not enough, when he was busted. He did not invent email systems, his email program did not inspire any later ones. In short, he was an unknown dead end until he started selling himself as something he never was.

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[fatboy]

Names cannot be copyrighted. Trademarked, yes, copyrighted, no.

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[DriedClexler]

Wow, really? What practical applications of AI did anything from Chomsky's work facilitate?

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[SwedishPenguin]

Because he has actually studied the concepts unlike you? Socialism is simply an ideology which advocates working class (i.e. not the small elite called the capitalist class) ownership of the means of production, it has many branches and the one you're referring to (not really, but almost) is Marxism-Leninism which advocates a party-controlled state as the way to achieve Communism (note that Communism has never been achieved, it is the stateless and classless society). Anarchism has been around for hundreds of years and most of them have been socialists.

I suggest you read a book next time, but I suggest you start by going over the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism%E2%80%93Leninism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_socialism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

And the one I'm guessing you're advocating:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-libertarianism (A very recent term and quite poorly defined)

It may also interest you to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_and_anarcho-capitalism

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[cstacy]

Show me another program from ~1979 with all the features available in his "EMAIL" program and I will believe you, but I have yet to find one.

I used more than one email system between 1974-1979 that had all those features. One of them was written by a fellow high-schooler on an HP2000 Time Shared BASIC system. He was conceptually copying the very well-known technology at the time. There are many more examples. Some of the other systems I used in that timeframe were commercial offerings, and some were ARPANET (out of MIT). There were also much older systems which had fewer (but most) features. Email has been around a *very* long time. The whole thing is ridiculous, of course.

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[Antonovich]

Linguistics grad here too, and he didn't invent or re-invent anything. He did ruin several generations of thought on language and communication, and his theories have been directly responsible for the wasting of tens, if not hundreds of millions of wasted dollars/euros/pounds/pesos/etc. on thinking and theorising about such preposterous notions as a "LAD". Think of all the trees wasted on his books! The carbon footprint of this guy! FINALLY people are beginning to realise that his theories, if true, mean that it would be relatively easy to mimic in computers. Nothing of the sort has been shown to be true and people are starting to say enough time and money has been thrown away and it's time to start doing some actual science. This dude went beyond what most intelligent people could stomach if faced with the truth of the matter "No, all these obvious examples that clearly invalidate my hypothesis are not a problem for my very scientific theory. In fact, it's fine to have rules that are more suggestions-that-work-some-of-the-time as fundamental rules of nature". WTF!?! I finally started seeing through the rubbish that everyone was spouting after reading some of the work of David R Olson and, of course, the great hole-finder Roy Harris (if you dislike Chomsky's linguistics in the slighest you will have great fun reading this guy tear him a new one!). After reading Olson's "The history of writing" I came to the conclusion (certainly others have come to the same) that the key problem with Chomsky is that he is unable to understand that his theories describe nothing more than the decidedly "unnatural" behaviours and reactions of people who have been taught to read. And not only taught to read but taught to read a language written with an alphabet. He has described nothing more than the way (almost always Western) literate people react to linguistic stimuli when brought up in a profoundly writing-based society. The problem is that even children's and illiterates' views on language are heavily coloured by the omnipresent written word in modern literate cultures. I put this to Olson in person when he was over in my neck of the woods (NZ) and while he wasn't completely convinced, he wasn't unconvinced either :-). I can point to some very interesting literature if anyone's interested. What the generativists have done is turn the greco-roman grammatical tradition into a pseudo-science. And yes after 4 years of linguistics I gave up in disgust and started another degree in IT!

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[scot4875]

The sort of thing that leads to revolutions followed closely by mass graves when a critical mass tire of slapping the lies down.

You're concerned about that, yet you've had a .sig calling for the destruction of democrats for ... how long?

--Jeremy

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[Anonymous Coward]

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.

That would accurately describe about 90% of Slashdotters.

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[slew]

"To", "From", "cc", and "subject" are all parts of the original 1975 RFC for mail transport protocol which standardized the eariler 1973 RFC.

In the days of the eariler internet, the ideas of "from" and "sender" were not presumed to be the same (or example, it might be assumed that the "from" might be the person that dictated the message and the "sender" was the secretary, or even an automated computer process).

Email with a "To" routed to a machine located in your own organization was usually very trivial (user name only, no machine name at all, or at most the name of any machine on the locally admistered network if your machine wasn't on that specific network), just like a memo.

Unfortunatly, non-local address mechanisms on the (pre-global-domain-routed) internet, were usually very complicated (unlike the post office or an internal organization memo). Today, postal addressing is hierarchical (even pre-zipcode, postal addressing was city-state and they tried to figure it out for you). The pre-domain internet** used to be like postal addressing of olden-times when you had to put a rural-route# as part of the address since many streets didn't have names and if it didn't get there, it was most likely gonna get stuck in general delivery at a sorting center.

Of course my experience isn't the earliest (I'm not that old yet). In case anyone is interested, the list of known routable email systems circa 1979 is listed in RFC 808, many of those systems had be up for at least 5 years and in specific, the BBN SNDMSG was up and going in 1971 (which is by general consensus the granddaddy of email systems, but they didn't use To/From, but the more cryptic TOUSR/RPY)...

**Life was especially bad in the early internet days when many folks had shiny new fully qualified domain name email addresses, but many machines (which were email endpoints) weren't connected to the internet so some addresses needed to have routing information that was composed of parts that were right to left (domain style) and some left to right (! uucp style). I had the mispleasure of implementing sendmail rules for rmail/domain/decnet routing, so I was scarred permanently by that period of time...

Re:Ask a better question

[dogsbreath]

I have trouble with this as well. Seems to me that the process plant I worked at before 1975 had RSX11 multitasking/multiuser/multiterminal systems in the dev lab that used terminal to terminal messaging. One of the programmers wrote a macro11 program that associated terminals with people working there and set up a message by name system that would drop received messages into a directory and notify the terminal user. As soon as we started hooking two computers together with async serial comms and then Decnet, the messaging was hacked to go over the links. I also remember multiple hacks using VT100 cursor commands to create screen editors and message viewers. uh. . . that's what we did for fun in between writing Fortran code to monitor oil pipelines and production facilities.

Not email by todays standards (more like a crudely addressed IM) but...

I am sure that as soon as there was a second terminal on a system, someone figured out a way to use it to communicate by text. I am just as sure that multiple people had the same idea at more or less the same time. Like as soon as they were exposed to hardware/software and had some time to futz with it.

Surely techies in the 60's were doing similar things with their Cobol/Fortran/JCL IBMs and CDCs.

Re:Ask a better question

[noh8rz3]

The self evident name will be "electronic mail" or some variation in any English speaking country

that's the rub, isn't it... it's likely that some variation of e-mail would have been coined in any case, but this dude *did* coin the term "e-mail". Thus he can say that he coined e-mail.

Remember the famous edison quote: "anybody, peering back into history, can claim an invention is self evident. Only the genius sees it as so before it is invented."

Re:Ask a better question

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Or maybe even brilliant in his field of linguistics, and a mixed bag when pontificating on politics.

Most of the reason why right wing authoritarians like jcmorris42 hate Chomsky is that Chomsky is intensely critical of the entire scheme of thought in which Western civilization (particularly the US) is a noble knight in shining armor bringing order and justice to a chaotic and immoral and backwards world. (Or would be, if only the leftists weren't screwing it up.)

Chomsky does himself no favors by being an ideologue in his own way, but that doesn't invalidate the many valid criticisms he's made of self-serving US foreign policies, particularly the really bad ones which are presented to the public (through a kind of Orwellian doublethink) as if the rest of the world ought to be grateful for them.

(signed, a former hater of Chomsky who eventually realized that a lot of the hate was a cognitive dissonance reaction to logical statements which pointed out contradictions between what I believed the US' role to be, and what it was actually doing. I'm not exactly a Chomskyite now, but I'm not instantly dismissive either.)

Re:Ask a better question

[AK Marc]

So he's like the birther of 9/11?

Re:Ask a better question

[neonsignal]

Chomsky's theories date back to the 1950s, and while they have their flaws, his exposition of transformational grammar was a sea-change in the study of syntax. You can't both at the same time claim that (a) he "didn't invent" anything, and (b) that he "did ruin several generations of thought on language and communication" with that thing that he didn't event.

You are also confused about the particular replicability of his generative grammars on computers; Chomsky's particular version of the generative grammars have proven less easy to implement in computerized natural language processing than some of the other more deterministic phrase structure grammars, and for many languages with free word order, dependency grammars have been a easier choice.

And the reality now is that a lot of NLP projects have given up on defined grammars and resorted to stochastic models; because for many applications people don't care about defining syntax at all (which requires time-consuming language study), they just care about outcomes. Unfortunately this has meant that success rates have plateaued after the initial quantum improvement, because while stochastic models are "relatively easy to mimic in computers", they don't always add insight into how human language works. "Doing science" when it comes to syntax involves more than just evaluating the social statistics of language use, it also includes modeling the generative power of human language.

It isn't enough to criticize the Euro-centric nature of transformational grammar. It is a valid criticism, but it is only useful scientifically if one develops a new theory that has even better explanatory power, that encompasses the success of previous theories and adds to that success. Success means the ability to predict which sentences are well formed.

The more interesting debate is the origin of natural language grammar; whether it is conscious consensus, innate, or emergent. The "greco-roman grammatical tradition" clearly falls into the first category, which is in stark contrast to Chomsky's idea that human brains may have language specific structures, while the emergent hypothesis is more widely accepted these days. These debates are interesting, because it is possible that all of these ideas may have varying degrees of truth.

You have to be willing to think outside the box when discussing these big ideas in linguistics (indeed, in all science). Even if an idea might seem preposterous to you, it is useful to challenge your preconceptions of how the world works. An example is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the structure of language affects a person's conceptualization of the world. Though it now lacks general acceptance, it still serves as an interesting counter to the axiom that language structure has no affect at all on cognition, and there are interesting experimental examples of the effect of linguistic categories on cognition.

Re:Ask a better question

[Compaqt]

I wonder what the people who are quite vociferously attacking this fellow think of Steve Jobs' claim to have invented "IPHONE".

"All this technology already existed"

"There were touchscreen phones before Jobs' phone"

"This wasn't the first smartphone!"

"This wasn't the first phone"

"People had been making phone calls for a long time before the so-called IPHONE".

"There were plenty of ITU standards for telephony before IPHONE."

"Once you have the idea of integrated circuits and communication by radio waves, the implementation of a multitouch screen phone with Internet is quite obvious. Implementation left as an exercise for the reader. "

"Anybody could have done that."

"It's quite natural that an Internet-based phone would be called some combination of Internet phone, I-PHONE, or IPHONE. Call it IPHONESYSTEM to help you understand better."

Re:Ask a better question

[AK Marc]

Your argument is that an email client must have drafts, or it can't be email. I dismiss your argument as irrelevant.

Re:Ask a better question

[Antonovich]

First class honours from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Re:Ask a better question

[Antonovich]

And I was also awarded the VUW Linguistics prize.

Re:Ask a better question

[cjsm]

People stupid enough to buy into his shit frighten me. In the context of the 20th century his political writings are jaw dropping.

I know, your another American fascist that doesn't care about the millions of innocent people the United States has killed around the world, not a tear shed for the innocent Iraqis, Vietnamese, Cambodians, El Salvadorians, Guatemalans, etc, etc killed by the U.S. And because Chomsky does, he's full of shit. People who think like you are murderers, along with Bush, Cheney, Obama, Reagan, Nixon, Johnson, etc.

Re:Ask a better question

[retchdog]

i don't fully understand and you may clarify your question if you wish, but i find chomsky's appeals to be literally correct which i can't say for truthers. birthers might have a point, but i find that whole business very nasty and distasteful.

Re:Ask a better question

[wrook]

You seem to be looking at one small part of Chomsky's work and assuming that is the entirety of it. There is hardly a paper published in the field of language acquisition (i.e., Humans learning human languages) that does not somehow refer back to Chomsky's work. I mean the work other than formal grammar theory.

Seriously, the guy was all over the place. Personally, I think it's a stretch to say that he reinvented linguistics. There were a lot of people involved. But there is really no denying that linguistics and language acquisition theory was completely completely restructured and he was a key part of it.

Re:Ask a better question

[AK Marc]

it also provides a convenient red flag for identifying right-wing hit pieces; if anyone says "chomsky said that he believes X," chances are good that it's a lie. now, i personally think that chomsky is sort of pointlessly discrediting himself and the entire anti-war left by focusing on this detail which is of questionable importance, but i still don't feel the need to misrepresent him.

If a birther believes X, then the opposite is likely true.

Birthers can speak the truth and still be wrong. Obama hasn't provided his original birth certificate long form. Nor has he provided a long form reproduction from HI. Nevermind that most people don't have their original certificate, only reproductions, and that the long form is no longer issued by HI, and the Republican governor looked up Obama's file personally and verified that the information on the short form is 100% correct, but they can't give more than that because the paper forms were destroyed when computerized. There's piles of evidence that Obama was born in HI, and even if not, he's likely a US citizen anyway. And there's not a single piece of evidence Obama was born anywhere else. And yet, birthers argue that point without ever actually stating a false statement.

The birthers are literally correct for the few facts they cling to, but factually correct on a few points doesn't mean they are correct for their intervening logic, or conclusion.

Re:Ask a better question

[HornWumpus]

There was a cold war on. People like Chomsky blame the USA for the actions of both sides in the cold war.

Look at what that moron (Chomsky) wrote about Pol Pot. His own words discredit his position.

Re:Ask a better question

[Eponymous Hero]

i know, so what's up with the offtopics? where's my troll points, goddammit!

Re:Ask a better question

[M4n]

MOD MOAR!!

Re:Ask a better question

[hellop2]

Huh? Didn't they produce pictures of the hijackers a couple days after 9/11? I mean, how long does it take to look at the passenger list and narrow down the ones that aren't soccer moms?

Then why did your post get +4 Interesting?

Re:Ask a better question

[retchdog]

oh, i see the confusion now. what i meant was: that usually the person, Y, who claims "chomsky believes X" is lying, simply because chomsky assiduously avoids stating his personal beliefs explicitly. Y is almost always making an unfounded extrapolation, which often makes me wonder if they understand how to apply logic to political issues at all.

of course, the flip side of the coin is that the left-wing chomsky fans also tend to interpret what chomsky is saying in a much grander scope than what he is literally saying; for example, they'll interpret the rather technical point "no legal evidence against osama" to mean something like "and so, the usa was completely wrong in conducting any military operation in response to 9/11." i'll eat my shoes if chomsky really isn't aware of having this effect, as he sometimes demurely claims.

Re:Ask a better question

[ToadProphet]

And what, exactly, do pictures of swarthy looking folks getting on a plane have to do with anything? Anyone can posit that they were linked to al Qaeda, what's relevant is that Obama's statement was false - they had no proof linking any of the bombers to al Qaeda or Osama bin Laden 'quickly after the 9/11 attacks were carried out'. In fact, it wasn't until a long time after the invasion of Afghanistan that the supposed smoking gun turned up in the form of an OBL statement right before the 2004 elections.

There's a vast difference between suspicion and proof, and one would expect that there's a requirement of proof in order to invade a country. Chomsky is largely pointing that out, as have a number of other commentators.

Re:Ask a better question

[cjsm]

Can you point out the specific quotes in question? All I see him is questioning what is the accurate account of deaths in Cambodia by the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot was a mass murderer, but the U.S. bought him to power. They overthrew the Cambodian Monarchy, installed a puppet government, and carpet bombed the country. This led to Pol Pot's rise to power. If the Soviet Union had overthrown the U.S. Government, and carpet bombed the U.S., and the aftermath was warring bands of killers that murdered and raped and starved people by stealing their food, the Soviet Union would bear responsibility, even if they had abandoned the U.S. before this occurred. Similar to the U.S. and Cambodia. Pol Pot committed the crimes directly, but the U.S. bombing etc., led to it.

Enlighten people such as myself me realize that both sides in the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States, were murderous. In fact, all Colonial powers in history are murderers, Britain, Spain, Belgium, Germany, Japan, etc. We are ruled by murderers, and always have been.

Re:Ask a better question

[fijiaaron]

Is your definition of "murderers" part of the "reinvention of linguistics"

Re:Ask a better question

[AK Marc]

Perhaps he knows he's having the effect and doesn't care. I know that if I take out the trash and the wife negligently threw a cola away without dumping and rinsing it that the drips will attract ants. Saying "I didn't realize I was causing an insect problem" is easier to get away with than "they are fucking ants, who the hell cares." I'd take Chomsky's denials to be more of the latter, but dressed up in niceties. He knows he's having the effect, but he can't stop stupidity. The truth is that there was essentially no evidence gathered or presented that justified action against Saddam or Osama. Saddam was innocent of all accusations Bush made (yellow cake, proven wrong long before Bush lied about it to the people, WMDs found were all inoperative US-made WMDs sold to Saddam, there was no WMD program, but there was a propoganda campaign by Saddam to pretend there was so that Iran wouldn't invade) Was Saddam a bad man? Yes. Did he deserve to be removed from power? Probably. Did the US have any justification to do it themselves unilaterally (I mean coalitionally, how many members are still in the coalition?), no. How about the taliban, being wiped out because they dared ask the US to provide evidence before they arrest and extradite a resident?

Sometimes those sitting on the fence because they don't know who to believe need to hear the truth, regardless of whether it will confuse some ants.

Re:Ask a better question

[trb]

Articles mentioned him copyrighting the term EMAIL (and I repeated that non-fact), but his claim is really on the name EMAIL and his copyright, which was on his program and user manual, as noted on his web site here.

http://www.inventorofemail.com/

He calls himself the "inventor of email" which is silly. He registered a copyright with the US copyright office. Again, there did not seem to be any innovation involved. He wrote an email program, and registered his copyright. The only remotely interesting thing about it is that it was named EMAIL. If he had produced a television and called it TELEVISION, and it was after other people had already produced and refined televisions, it would be false to claim to be the inventor of television.

Re:Ask a better question

[Chris Burke]

'Course not. I'm wondering why bother with the lies when what he actually did was pretty cool anyway? It's not like he has any chance of getting royalties or anything.

Re:Ask a better question

[retchdog]

yeah, pretty much.

i mostly agree with all, except that i don't think that the taliban could have done anything to prevent our attack. and i don't even have a problem with that; i just wish a D had been in office so that we could have had some surgical black ops rather than the boisterous clusterfuck the Rs use to rally votes.

Re:Ask a better question

[HornWumpus]

You pretty much just repeated it.

You blame the USA for the raise to power of one of the lefts worst bastards (after Hitler, Stalin and Mao).

You realize the VC were using Cambodia and Laos as safe havens to strike from? You realize the governments of both countries let it happen? Did they expect no consequences? There was a war on.

Re:Ask a better question

[Johann Lau]

Just having a hack like Chomsky's name attached speaks volumes

Ohhh... another vampire afraid of garlic, trying to act all tough.

Who the fuck are you clown to tell anyone what is a non-story? Hahaha. The nerve.

Re:Ask a better question

[Johann Lau]

"probably", "insofar as you can tell"?

heh. what kind of dumb clusterfuck is this thread even.... even if the guy didn't invent email, there's so much derp here to last for 5 threads; what gives?

Re:Ask a better question

[cjsm]

I didn't blame the U.S. for Stalin, Hitler or Mao. Typical right winger, making up stuff. You do realize the Viet Cong were South Vietnamese? Do you know Ho Chi Minh tried to get the U.S. to help him fight the French colonialists for liberation, but the U.S. instead took over the battle. Do you realize in 1956 the U.S. and Diem refused to hold elections prescribed by the Geneva Convention because they knew Ho Chi Minh would win? So much for fighting for democracy. Do you know Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident to use it as an excuse to expand the war? Do you know why the U.S. lost the Vietnam war? Because most of the people in South Vietnam opposed to the U.S. I guess carpet bombing and spreading agent orange over your fields would make one feel that way.

What makes you think the U.S. has the right to kill people all over the world in defensive of Capitalism? This democracy facade the U.S. is supposedly fighting for is bullshit, as shown by the numerous dictatorships the U.S. has backed around the world over the decades, and the democracies it has overthrown to put in a U.S. friendly government, see Iran - 1953, Guatemala- 1954, , Brazil- 1964, Chili - 1971, etc.

Whether or not Cambodia was being used as a haven by the South Vietnamese Viet Cong doesn't affect whether or not the U.S. backed war and bombing led to the rise of Pol Pot. Pol Pot would have never risen to power without the U.S. destruction of Cambodia. And the U.S. had no right to be killing those people in the first place. Did the Viet Cong attack the U.S.? Show me the bombed out cities in the U.S. caused by the Viet Cong.

Stop buying in to the Government propaganda. The U.S. actions in the world are just as criminal as the Soviet Union's or any other imperialist power in history.

Re:Ask a better question

[cjsm]

No, my definition of murderers is rulers who kill millions of people in foreign countries who never attacked or threatened their own country. Your the one saying Presidents who kill millions of innocent people aren't murderers. You're the one parroting the 1984 doublespeak from the government and media. I'm the one cutting through the lies and bullshit.

Re:Ask a better question

[hellop2]

Very quickly (in just a couple of days according to my recollection) the media showed mosaics of a dozen+ of the hijackers. This was not airport footage. It seems likely this image was submitted to the media, as opposed to being due to investigative work on the part of the media..

Oh, wikipedia confirms all of this: On September 14, three days after the attacks, the FBI announced the names of 19 persons.

It seems weird that you would claim our President lied to the American people saying our gov't quickly learned "the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda". But, perhaps we actually are in agreement here, in that there was something fishy about the "proof".

I thought it was strange how quickly the attacks were originally attributed to the Taliban... thinking that it was mighty convenient for them to so quickly solve the investigation considering the PNAC goals. But here I was playing devil's advocate stating that it would have been easy to identify the most likely perpetrators given the choices of A: 3 members of the Springfield Junior-high PTA, and B: 19 Arabs with ties to a terrorist organization. Really, do you require more proof that said terrorist organization was involved in planning the attacks? Or, are you really arguing that we ought to give those guys the benefit of the doubt because it might have just been a coincidence they were all on the planes?

Re:Ask a better question

[hellop2]

p.s. It wasn't the highly suspicious "confession tape" that finally gave the gov't proof. (really you should look into that) It was the dossiers and databases on the hijackers the gov't already had which linked them to Al Qaeda.

If it was "invented" today.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[MightyMartian]

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.

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

[circletimessquare]

clever troll or genuine crackpot?

you decide

either way, laugh

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[circletimessquare]

LOL!!!

thank you for the smile

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[An ominous Cow art]

There is a clear genealogy, and that even goes back into the 1960s with Multics.

Yeah - a while ago, I lost a day reading through the stuff on www.multicians.org. I remember this story, though, relevant to this Slashdot article.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[radtea]

None of this should be taken to diminish Chomsky's work in linguistics which was altogether very impressive.

I think you misspelled "mostly wrong". Interesting, sure. But mostly wrong: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/10/daniel-everett-amazon

I realize there is still ongoing debate about this because Chomsky has always fiercely defended his theory-of-the-moment, but whole notion of a "language instinct" is pretty tenuous on purely evolutionary grounds. All features of organisms are genetic tendencies that elaborate themselves in a particular developmental context. The insistence that there is a single, genetically determined "deep grammar" would make language completely unlike every other aspect of all organisms everywhere.

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

[Bryansix]

Any comment that implies Noam Chomsky is wrong 99% of the time is a comment I can get behind. It is interesting because it is true.

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.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[MightyMartian]

He may have been the first person to drop the hyphen, yes. But the RFCs and other documents show that the terms "electronic mail" and "e-mail" were already in use. Beyond that, he and his supporters have yet to demonstrate that even so far as the acronym "email" without the hyphen was created and/or popularized by him.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[HornWumpus]

Your last question: Because he's one of the last commies standing. Hence all the other commies have to ref him. Even better he's not a *studies type moron. Which even they know says 'Everything I say is dogma, I'm beyond reason.'

This all has to do with the terrible state of humanities education. Relativism is just stupid.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[cartman]

It appears he did coin the term "email" spelled without a hyphen. He certainly did not invent electronic mail, or any of the essential features of it.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[DriedClexler]

A more recent casualty of the same phenomenon is David Graeber, who wrote a mostly impressive anthropological study, but which included this howler, which he defended to the bitter end:

Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages...

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[HornWumpus]

It's all a gamble. You prefer to gamble on government being responsible. I prefer to gamble on hard productive assets. Each has lots of ways we can get screwed.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[mvdwege]

You just proved the point. No-one who has read Chomsky or listened to him and judged his work factually would call him a commie.

Chomsky is at worst a liberatarian Socialist, but he's closer to an all-out Anarchist.

Mart

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[HornWumpus]

No such thing as a 'libertarian socialist'. It's contradictory. Socialism includes strong state power right in the definition. Money is power, when the state runs the economy it has all the power.

Anybody who can twist their mind to the point that 'libertarian socialist' doesn't trigger a 'divide by zero' is beyond reason. They likely think communism is a good idea that has just been implemented badly. Like I say, beyond reason.

He's a red, face facts. The fact he's a crypto-commie doesn't change that he's a commie.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[pfg23]

Very true. Isaac Newton got seriously into Alchemy in his later years.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[pfg23]

But the part of your post that's not true is that Chomsky's elucidation of U.S. interventionism can only be called a "counter-narrative" because the official narrative was a lie.

Re:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell

[mvdwege]

No such thing as a 'libertarian socialist'. It's contradictory.

Thank you for proving that I don't have to seriously enter into a discussion with you. You would do well to read up on a little more history before knee-jerking your way into ridiculousness.

Mart

Mumps?

[dickens]

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.

Re:Mumps?

[dickens]

not any more than I had to...

Re:Mumps?

[isdnip]

I was there too. The system in question was called EMS, or Corporate Electronic Mail System. It only supported a couple of thousand users because it wasn't networked. It ran on a standalone computer with about 30 modems on it, so you dialed in to read or send mail. All messages stayed on that machine, in one big MUMPS global file. And the program went down daily to maintain the global. Plug-ugly. Many more DEChies used the DECnet email system on the Engineering Network. That one had ARPAnet gateways, and was a real networked mail system.

Shiva's work was more like CEMS, a closed non-network toy system. By the standards of its day, it was pretty primitive. By 1977, BBN's HERMES did more than Shivas ever did, over the ARPAnet. And was user friendly, not just a geek tool.

wikipedia covers the history nicely

[Sebastopol]

Most of my immediate rants are captured already:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#Email_claims

Re:wikipedia covers the history nicely

[jedidiah]

Seems like these guys are using the "iPod argument".

Sure other people invented all of the pieces but they were the first ones to tie it together with a bow and make it easy to use. It sounds like they MAY have created the first walled garden mail system along the lines of Lotus Notes or Outlook/Exchange.

Want a "word processor" for your email program? Just point your email client to a suitable editor.

"Tight integration" isn't exactly required.

Re:wikipedia covers the history nicely

[s.petry]

I very much like the point that writing a function or program called "AIRPLANE" does not make you Wilbur Wright! I spit some coffee out laughing at that one...

Chomsky's "facts" are as wrong as Ayyadurai's

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Chomsky's "facts" are as wrong as Ayyadurai's

[cartman]

That is a complete falsehood!

Chomsky relies heavily upon ad hominem arguments these days.

Re:Chomsky's "facts" are as wrong as Ayyadurai's

[littlewink]

But that's how Chomsky sees everything: as a vast right-wing conspiracy that keeps moving his cheese.

It's all about the protocol

[SirGarlon]

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.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[MightyMartian]

Ayyadurai was shopping himself around as the inventory of email. When he got nailed by several people who demonstrated by simply going through the relevant RFCs dating back to around 1970-71 that this guy had absolutely nothing to do with the development of the electronic mail system that even by 1978 was the prevalent system for much of Western academia, suddenly it became this "I copyrighted a bit of software". He was cut so grossly overinflating his importance that I think you have to call him a liar.

As to Chomsky, as I've said, he most certainly must have been using Unix-based mail back in those days, so I can't figure out how he can justify coming to this guy's defense.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[berashith]

I thought that the invention that BBN provided was the @ in the address. I worked there, and the lore came up a lot. I walked past the picture of the guy every day in the lobby ( which btw was the greated corp PR picture ever, he was lieing on his side, propped on an elbow ) . I even spoke with him at a christmas event ( but not about email) . I do know that even while this was done, it was seen as an obvious step. A symbol was needed that wasnt used often, so it wouldnt conflict with any names or such that already existed. Sending a message to a user at a different computer... OH SHIT ... " AT " a different computer. As many have noted here, the passing around was alreayd taking place, but the shining usefulness was the @ , as that is what lets everyone know that a string means something, in the same way that a phone number or an SSN ( to USA-ians) is instantly recognizable. I dont see the need for the drama over the invention of something that was already happening.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[jedidiah]

> There is a certain value to making something actually work.

He can't claim credit for that either.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[hardluck86]

He still invented the light bulb, dammit!)

Ehhhh.... well, no actually he didn't.
Sorry.
The light bulb was invented by a couple of Canadians.
They couldn't afford to get it working fully and sold it to Edison. http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/cool/002027-2003-e.html

Edison (well, his lab monkeys anyway) DID get a viable working version going though.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[SirGarlon]

As to Chomsky, as I've said, he most certainly must have been using Unix-based mail back in those days, so I can't figure out how he can justify coming to this guy's defense.

Hey, I admire Chomsky for his principles, but even I admit he has an ego the size of a planet and will use the thinnest pretext to get his name in the headlines again.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[Minwee]

(Please forget everything you learned from the Oatmeal about Tesla and Edison. Other than that, I'm modding you up because I completely agree with you.)

Please apply some critical thinking to everything that both Forbes and The Oatmeal have to say about Edison.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[SirGarlon]

Edison (well, his lab monkeys anyway) DID get a viable working version going though.

That's my definition of "invented." There are other definitions that are perfectly reasonable, and clearly the Edison-lightbulb thing doesn't fit yours.

Hmm ... maybe different definitions of "invented" are what this kerfuffle is really about.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[jmorris42]

> I admire Chomsky for his principles, but even I admit he has an ego the size of a
> planet and will use the thinnest pretext to get his name in the headlines again.

This word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means. If your definition of 'principles' includes the notion that bearing false witness is acceptable then I must question your moral compass as well as Chomsky's.

Perhaps you should log off and spend a quiet month or two in study and reflection on basic principles or morality and decide what you really believe. I suspect you believe many things that you have been told by others are true and haven't bothered to think any of it out for yourself.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[operagost]

I love theoatmeal.com, but logic isn't really his strong suit. His meta-rebuttal still falls short, and his strip on "War in the name of atheism" doesn't address the fact that, indeed, state-enforced atheism was part of the policies of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. They didn't actually go to war over atheism, but people were persecuted for opposing the policies. The results were the same: a bunch of dead or imprisoned people.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[idontgno]

If your definition of 'principles' includes the notion that bearing false witness is acceptable then I must question your moral compass as well as Chomsky's.

Actually, the relevant question isn't whether GPP's principles include moral support for truthfulness... the relevant question is whether Chomsky's principles do.

I wonder if "telling a lie to tell a more important truth" isn't the problem. Chomsky's contrafactual take on the argument tells me that he's advocating something more important to him than mere objective history. (Or, obliquely, that there is no such thing as "objective history", and he just wants his lie to win out in the marketplace of lies.)

Re:It's all about the protocol

[jklovanc]

He still invented the light bulb, dammit!

Here is where semantics come in Edison did not invent the "light bulb" he invented the "first commercially viable incandescent light bulb". The term "light bulb" is much too broad to describe what Edison did while "first commercially viable incandescent bulb" is much more accurate. The issue comes in when people write about Edison and find that the longer, more accurate, term is too cumbersome and opt for the shorter, less accurate, term. It would be the same if Ford was credited with inventing "manufacturing" when he actually invented the "assembly line form of manufacturing".
It is also debatable whether Edison invented the "first commercially viable incandescent light bulb" himself or did he assign William Joseph Hamme to try every possible material till one that worked was found. Edison himself credits William Joseph Hammer as "a pioneer of incandescent electric lighting". Edison's name is on many patents but that does not mean that he was the driving force behind them.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[jmorris42]

> Actually, the relevant question isn't whether GPP's principles include moral support for truthfulness...

No. The poster I replied to said he 'admired Chomsky's principles' and in the same breath admitted he was almost certainly bearing false witness. Don't know about you but my moral code only has a small number of exceptions to the unacceptability of lying. Things like deception in wartime, etc. Lying to advance an academic argument is simply must be out of bounds if civilization is to remain a viable notion. I can believe somebody is wrong and believe they have principles. I can't believe they are intentionally lying and believe they have principles. Don't care which side they are fighting for. Unfortunately the other team does believe in the rightness of lying in service to a political cause (or at least the ability to doublethink it away) and that speaks volumes about the rest of their moral code. The first lie is always to yourself.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[scot4875]

Unfortunately the other team does believe in the rightness of lying in service to a political cause (or at least the ability to doublethink it away) and that speaks volumes about the rest of their moral code. The first lie is always to yourself.

Lie: "Death panels." Doublethink: "Sanctity of life" vs. death penalty and support of war.

Your move.

--Jeremy

Re:It's all about the protocol

[scot4875]

First, you can't do something in the name of atheism because atheism doesn't have any tenets, it has no commandments, and it isn't a philosophy. It's simply a lack of belief in gods. Atheists and atheist organizations are certainly capable of committing atrocities just like religious ones; what they can't do is claim that god told them to do it.

Second, let me cure some of your ignorance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nazi_Germany#Nazi_Attitudes_towards_Christianity

--Jeremy

Re:It's all about the protocol

[jmorris42]

Oh I was hoping somebody would engage with a hard question or two. Alas. Challenge accepted, such as it is.

> Lie: "Death panels."

Um, have you actually read any of what your guys say when you don't think we are listening? You might want to start by Googling the "Complete LIVES system". Now consider how much of the health care reform bill is empty except for phrases like "to be determined by the secretary of HHS" and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this will end up when the bills start piling up and the money starts running out. See Europe, it is farther along but if the SCOTUS fails in their duty we will be right behind em.

"Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."
  -- Ezekiel Emanuel

or

"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated."
  -- Ezekiel Emanuel

Sounds like death panels to me. Especially when we consider the burden of proof under discussion here, where the person saying 'Death Panel" would have to be knowingly bearing false witness and not just wrong.

> Doublethink: "Sanctity of life" vs. death penalty and support of war.

Implied in most people's use of the phrase 'sanctity of life' is the concept of 'innocent' As in killing the unborn for reasons other than self defense is killing the innocent. Not wanting to open that can 'o worms though, but it does make the most obvious example. Executing a murderer is a whole different kettle of fish, at least for me. For me the question comes down to what to do with a murderer; I don't want most of them EVER returning to the streets and see no compelling reason to expend the vast resources required by our courts to keep them in prison for the remainder of their natural lives. Their rights are forfeit by their crime, we can expell them from our society and the protection of the laws they have rejected and there isn't any place to banish them to. On the other hand a non-trivial number do take your position that all life is sacred and reasonable people can argue it.

But not war. I feel nothing but pity for a pacifist. Wretches who live only by the efforts of better men than they. I'm a anti-idiotarian libertarian myself so I'm more non-initiation of force instead of against all violence.

Re:It's all about the protocol

[SirGarlon]

If your definition of 'principles' includes the notion that bearing false witness is acceptable then I must question your moral compass as well as Chomsky's.

"Bearing false witness" is a Biblical turn of phrase. In that case, I'll call your attention to Matthew 7:1-2; but no hard feelings, see also Matthew 6:14.

My moral compass is fine, thanks. I think this Ayyadurai guy probably really believes his work is relevant and that he deserves to be remembered at least as co-inventor of email. I think Chomsky probably believes it too, but is choosing to wrap his argument in an unsupported accusation in order to amplify the attention. Now "unsupported" does not mean "insincere." Making statements one believes to be true, but can't support, is far from "false witness."

If you are referring to some other incident where Chomsky has been caught in an out-and-out lie and thoroughly discredited, I'm not aware of it. If you can cite the incident then it's quite possible you'll change my opinion of Chomsky.

So by hack you mean...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Maybe he invented the name, but...

[MightyMartian]

The term "electronic mail" was used to describe the mail system developed along with Unix in 1970-71 (and that itself was originally designed as a compatible rewrite of the Multics mail system). It's possible that the term "email", as opposed to "electronic mail" or "e-mail" may have been first used by this guy, but his mail system had nothing to do with the routed mail system that had already been in use for seven years or so by various universities and various government departments in the US and abroad, and those systems, based around the mbox format that was pretty much fully detailed by 1975. People were exchanging emails over ARPANet years before this guy wrote his email program.

more importantly

[circletimessquare]

who invented Noam Chomsky?

I mean as some sort of authority figure

Re:more importantly

[Sponge Bath]

The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.
--Dalai Lama

Re:more importantly

[circletimessquare]

LOL

a statement against authority figures, and an appeal to reason, as spoken by an authority figure

I agree with the quote, I just find the paradox funny

Re:more importantly

[BanHammor]

Which is even funnier.

Re:more importantly

[fnj]

Somehow I don't think the Dalai Lama sees himself as what you see him as.

Re:more importantly

[Johann Lau]

"as spoken by an authority figure"

ORLY? citation needed or something. because if you don't provide one, you actually are doing what you claim Chomsky is doing: you claim something, offering nothing to back it up, and we have to agree because you said it -- right? Well no, so feel free to suspend the irony anytime by citing the relevant parts :P

Noam Chomsky is...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Relevance

[GofG]

Noam Chomsky is an extremely accomplished cognitive scientist and linguist. His theories about the universal grammar of communication between intelligences have won him many awards and are extremely well-regarded in the field. He is probably a genius.

Unfortunately, he thinks that his special genius in the field of linguistics is actually just a "generalized special genius" and has written over 100 books on every controversial topic ever, espousing very anarcho-communistic views.

If you're doing work in linguistics or designing the syntax of a language or something, you would be right to revere him, so long as you ignored the rest of his stuff.

If you are still confused as to why he is such a big deal, he has been called by many of his supporters, "the 21st century's Carl Sagan", in that he pushes for science education for children and has given 'public science awareness' speeches similar in quality to the Pale Blue Dot lecture. On this surface level, he is a very good asset to the scientific community, but if you go any deeper he's a loony.

This again?

[niado]

SIGH :(

email or "email"?

[Michael_gr]

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.

Re:email or "email"?

[rot26]

Pi internets to you sir.

In Other News...

[0xG]

Rock star Bono has lent his support to the patent claim.
Because, you know, he's a star!

The claim is Ayyadurai coined the WORD "email"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The claim is Ayyadurai coined the WORD "email"

[ZombieBraintrust]

No the article links to a website named www.inventorofemail.com that Ayyadurai owns. He owns a bunch of similer sites. Ayyadurai did claim he invented email.

Re:The claim is Ayyadurai coined the WORD "email"

[Solandri]

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.

If the term "electronic mail" were used before Ayyadurai , I think e-mail as an abbreviation would've been obvious to anyone with a chemistry or physics background. The shorthand notation for 'electron' is e-. All of this was before my time, but that was the first thing that crossed my mind when a college classmate called it e-mail in the late 1980s. I figured it was a clever abbreviation of "electron"-ic mail, which is also a double entendre since the mail is literally composed of electrons rather than paper and ink. Not an abbreviation because 'electronic' starts with the letter 'e'.

Anyway, does it really matter who did the abbreviation first? Do you know who first shortened "motor hotel" to "motel"? Or "remote control" to "remote"? Or "television" to "TV"? Do you care? It might be of some interest to a linguist writing a paper on the development of language, but technically and socially it doesn't matter.

Re:Relevance

[Loosifur]

Noam Chomsky as a linguist? Incomparable. Like Newton, Einstein, and Hawking to physics, all rolled into one. Even beyond linguistics, the stuff this guy has done has rippled through everything from psychology to computer science. He's a legend.

Noam Chomsky as a political theorist? Bit of a whack-a-doo. Sort of lives out on the socialist/anarchist fringe. Likes to be outrageous, a little bit of a bomb-thrower. Like other people who spend a lot of time in the theoretical world, he tends to oversimplify foreign policy, international political economy, and economics in order to promote his own views "logically," while glossing over or missing entirely facts that don't quite fit his framework. He's kind of found his unifying theory for the world, and it's sort of a labor-oriented anarcho-communist struggle against authority, tradition, and convention. I struggle with Chomsky because there are a lot of things that he says with which I agree, and there are some things he says with which I disagree but can understand and respect his views, but then there are things that he says that are just tinfoil hat, howl-at-the-moon loopy.

All of this is my opinion, of course. I'm sure a lot of people find Chomsky's political beliefs totally reasonable. But when he said that Obama ordering the hit on bin Laden was equivalent to al Qaeda attacking George W. Bush's "compound" (his words, and I believe it's called a "ranch"), killing him, and dumping his body in the sea, he just sounded like a crazy old man to me, desperate to be seen as a "dangerous, radical outsider." He actually compared Bush to the Nazis, and claimed that Bush was responsible for all of the sectarian conflict in the Middle East. Funny that the equivalence wasn't between Obama (who signed off on the hit) and bin Laden, but not terribly shocking considering the source. That's pretty much textbook Chomsky. He tends to view anything that a Western, 1st world power does as sinister, fascist, and immoral, while unconditionally embracing any non-Western, developing nations regardless of the deeds (or misdeeds) of their governments. It's a shame that he doesn't apply the same intellectual rigor to his political views, but, whatever. Any time something can be crammed into the radical revolutionary narrative, he's on board, facts or morality be damned.

As a matter fact, I'd be curious to hear what his thoughts on Syria are.

His website has comments on the main page.

[DrEnter]

That website of his (which makes some pretty ridiculous claims) has a public comments section. Disqus is an option for sign-in.

Hate and Envy

[ZombieBraintrust]

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.

Re:Hate and Envy

[exomondo]

Why do the RFC not count? No explanation.

Actually there is, it just isn't a very good one:
This quote, “email underpinnings were further cemented in 1977's RFC 733, a foundational document of what became the Internet itself.” [5] is a misuse of the term “email” because the RFCs (Request for Comments) and RFC 733 were written documentation not a computer program or code or a system.
http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp

So apparently coming up with the idea, describing it in detail and documenting isn't inventing it, but if you copy that idea that's real invention.

This is soooo not worth anyone's time...

[Lord_Jeremy]

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

Even Chomsky is just talking about the name

[isdnip]

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.

Industry Insiders?

[medv4380]

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.

Re:Relevance

[demachina]

"Neil DeGrasse Tyson . . . top geniuses of our time"

I wont argue about Dawkins and Chomsky though your use of genius is a little extravegent, they've done some good work, but Tyson, LOL. He is a show boating charlatan. What research or theories has he actually originated that rank him as a "top genius of our time". He did receive a gold medal on the U of T dance team so he has that going for him.

There is a role for talking heads on TV who try to explain science to the masses but if you've ever actually listened to him talk you quickly deduce that he is not a "top genius of our time". He is a top self promoter of our time and primarily out to self enrich himself. Michio Kaku has developed pretty much the same affliction though at least Kaku did do actual research somewhere back there.

Re:Relevance

[Anonymous Coward]

Newton had a bunch of whack-a-doo beliefs, too. His work on physics and optics was incredibly important, but nobody bothers to talk about his work on alchemy and non-trinitarian Christian theology, even though he personally considered them more important, because nobody really cares about his crazy stuff. A century after Chomsky is dead we'll remember his linguistics and say "oh, and he also held some controversial political views".

Cointage is not invention

[isdnip]

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.

Please mod parent up

[gambino21]

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".

As 'any fule kno' -

[GerryHattrick]

Fred Hoyle was to astrophysics what Noam Chomsky is to linguistics.

It was "net mail" prior to 1978, but e-mail still.

[quag7]

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

Re:It was "net mail" prior to 1978, but e-mail sti

[quag7]

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-nmail in 1977

[Skapare]

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.

Who invented Email?

[dgharmon]

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'

Interview with Shiva

[Quillem]

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.

Re:Interview with Shiva

[MightyMartian]

Frauds generally have a hard time finding work after they've been busted. This guy tried to take credit for a helluva lot of work by other people that knew nothing about him.

If this is the oulandish claims thread.

[the eric conspiracy]

I am the second Emperor of the United States, Norton II.

re: What exactly was there to 'invent' here?

[dgharmon]

"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.

Wiki's evidence is pretty scanty...

[SoupIsGood Food]

...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.

forgot his title

[Surt]

Noam Chomsky, renowned internet expert.

All Geniuses are Heretics, not vice versa

[alinuxguruofyore]

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.

For fuck's sake

[MrEricSir]

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.

Re:For fuck's sake

[noh8rz3]

obl didn't commit a *crime*, he commited an act of war. and when people commit acts of war we land 2 dozen seals in the yard and put bullets in brains.

Re:For fuck's sake

[rHBa]

Where are the mod points when you need them? +1 Insightful

Re:For fuck's sake

[AK Marc]

When people commit acts of war, we try them at Nuremberg. Unless we think we can get away with skipping the trial and going straight to the sentence.

Re:For fuck's sake

[j-beda]

obl didn't commit a *crime*, he committed an act of war. and when people commit acts of war we land 2 dozen seals in the yard and put bullets in brains.

By what standards do you judge the guilt of someone in this type of situation? Even if we accept the premise that "an act of war" was committed, how do we decide who should pay the penalty for it?

In a "regular" war, when the tanks or planes attack your territory it is pretty clear where they came from and who to launch the missiles against. No one has ever questioned the evidence that it was Germany that invaded Poland. But even in that situation, we went through the Nuremberg Trials in order to give some legitimacy to punishments handed out after hostilities were finished.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Trials

I am still pretty uncomfortable giving free reign to our "leaders" to declare anyone worthy of being killed on sight without any transparent system to attempt to ensure that power is used appropriately.

"They tell me that he committed an act of war, and when I am told people commit acts of war I am perfectly happy for us to land 2 dozen seals in the yard and put bullets in brains."

That doesn't sound as convincing as your statement.

Re:For fuck's sake

[noh8rz3]

i don't understand what the big deal is. For a century war was synonymous with anonymous death and destruction by the hundreds or thousands. now that we can precisely target a single individual (seals, helicopters, bullet in brain) instead of blowing up an entire apartment building, people come out of the woodwork crying about the human rights of that individual. But when it was scores of anonymi nobody cared.

hypocritical, right?

Re:For fuck's sake

[j-beda]

Hypocritical is when you say one thing and do something else. Changing (public) opinion is not hypocrisy - a person (or society) is supposed to change as circumstances change.

I also suggest that blowing up entire apartment buildings has never been something that has been widely accepted as justifiable.

Just because the "norm" used to be pretty awful does not remove our ability (or right) to criticize the current state of affairs.

But back on point (or at least the off-topic point I had originally replied to), signing someone's death warrant without any oversight is a poor way to set up a self-sustaining system of "justice", in my opinion. "Targeted killings" seem pretty unjustifiable in my mind from ethical as well as effectiveness arguments.

Re:For fuck's sake

[noh8rz3]

terrorism is political act through violent means. when the us or any actual country does it it's called war and other countries respond in kind. that's what big boys do.

Re:For fuck's sake

[noh8rz3]

justice is a construct for domestic matters. In international matters, the standard is "war crime". As long as obama is not committing a war crime, then he's good to go with his list or whatever.

Re:For fuck's sake

[j-beda]

justice is a construct for domestic matters. In international matters, the standard is "war crime". As long as obama is not committing a war crime, then he's good to go with his list or whatever.

I disagree - if there is such a thing as "justice" then it is applicable universally, and our actions internationally are not exempt from these ideals. Of course the big "BUT" is that there are few if any international mechanisms for enforcement of these sorts of ideals.

Purely from a domestic point of view, I don't feel that continued broadening of executive power without oversight mechanisms is a good thing to do. I suppose that if enough voters feel the same, the tide will eventually turn, but I've been waiting for a while and there seems to be no slowing.

Re:For fuck's sake

[noh8rz3]

I don't feel that continued broadening of executive power without oversight mechanisms is a good thing to do.

the problem is, the power of "rogue states" has increased several fold over the past 15 years or so. 9/11, subway attacks, wmds, training camps overseas. US needs expanded capabilities to meet these threats. this has been accomplished through broadening of executive power. This is one possible mechanisms, and others are viable i suppose. i would rather that obama have additional powers, rather than the army for example.

Re:For fuck's sake

[adavies42]

no, that's war crimes. if you commit acts of war, then you're in a state of war, which means the armed forces of your opponent are legally justified in shooting you dead as soon as they can find you. that's the whole point of legal concept of "state of war".

(there's a fine point to be argued about whether acts that would be acts of war given a formal declaration of war are acts of war or war crimes, but that's a different question.)

Re:For fuck's sake

[j-beda]

I don't feel that continued broadening of executive power without oversight mechanisms is a good thing to do.

the problem is, the power of "rogue states" has increased several fold over the past 15 years or so. 9/11, subway attacks, wmds, training camps overseas. US needs expanded capabilities to meet these threats. this has been accomplished through broadening of executive power. This is one possible mechanisms, and others are viable i suppose. i would rather that obama have additional powers, rather than the army for example.

Worldwide, the number (both absolute and in fractional terms) of violent deaths has been dropping since the 1400s. The power of "rogue states" may have increased, but the actual statistical danger to the population is no where near large enough to justify any dramatic changes in policies. I have not seen any credible evidence that increases in executive power has resulted in an increase in safety to the population. None of the things that the civil libertarian "extremists" have been complaining about has actually brought us any increased security, just increased oppression, cost, hassle, poor international PR, and overall-unpleasant experiences.

I am in fact not so concerned about these issues that I am building an armed compound out in the boonies or anything, and actually think that the majority of those in power actually think that most of these decisions are reasonable and effective. But I would be overjoyed that if in addition to "evidence based medicine", and "evidence based instructional systems", there was a larger movement towards "evidence based public policy" where we tried to have clearly stated objectives and attempted to actually measure the policies we put in place against those objectives.

What a bunch of dreamers we all are these days....

All this in a story about some wacko trying to make an over-reaching claim to fame....

Re:For fuck's sake

[AK Marc]

A non-state can't be at war. You can say you are at war with your neighbor, but if you shoot him, that won't work out so well as a valid defense, even if both of you signed a declaration of war. Osama declaring war on the US, or the US declaring war back is the same thing. Osama is not war capable. You can't declare war on a person or idea.

Fortran and hyphens

[ZombieBraintrust]

Does Fortran allow a hyphen in program names at that time? If not then you can't even say he dropped the hyphen.

Boston University RAX system had email in 1975

[Forever Wondering]

The RAX OS (later renamed VPS) had an email system called $mail from 1975 onward. The program was created by Michael Krugman, a programmer at BU's Academic Computing Center. RAX was a multiuser timesharing system, designed by people at the ACS on the university's academic mainframe that had thousands of users. Any user could send messages to others, set up aliases, etc.

---

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.

Re:Boston University RAX system had email in 1975

[MightyMartian]

System email has been around for a loooong time, at least since the mid-1960s. However, Shiva and/or his supporters have asserted that Shiva developed some sort of an intra-organizational email system, which is completely false. ARPANet was being used to distribute emails between various organizations since around 1971, and trivially accessible RFCs dating back to the very beginning show the evolution of the early mailbox protocols right up to modern SMTP mail systems today. Shiva had absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of email. It was an all but unknown dead end, until he got busted trying to claim otherwise.

Re:Boston University RAX system had email in 1975

[Forever Wondering]

System email has been around for a loooong time, at least since the mid-1960s.

Yes, this was pointed out on the first slashdot posting page when the Newsweek article came out a while back. Shiva was savaged from every corner, with copious examples of email systems older than his.

I wasn't even claiming Mike's $mail program was the first, merely that it predated Shiva's. But, $mail was heavily used by many people at BU at that time whereas [from what I've been able to ascertain] Shiva's program didn't get a large user following.

I had read your other posts on this page [keep up the good work, BTW] and I was going to place my reply under one of them, but then decided that RAX/$mail deserved its own posting. It wasn't widely known outside of BU, but it would qualify as "prior art".

However, Shiva and/or his supporters have asserted that Shiva developed some sort of an intra-organizational email system, which is completely false.

It is completely false. Shiva strikes me as a poseur/opportunist. His supporters appear to be [mostly] MIT alumni that are exercising NIH [from ignorance of and hubris towards true precursors] and just waving the old [MIT] school tie ...

ARPANet was being used to distribute emails between various organizations since around 1971, and trivially accessible RFCs dating back to the very beginning show the evolution of the early mailbox protocols right up to modern SMTP mail systems today. Shiva had absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of email. It was an all but unknown dead end, until he got busted trying to claim otherwise.

What's upsetting me is that someone who is somewhat distinguished [Chomsky] is trying to rekindle this. But, also, a quick glance at the "inventorofemail.com" website [from Shiva???], it appears that somebody is trying to capitalize on this. Brazen/shameless/ignorant.

Re:Because he didn't invent it

[MightyMartian]

For chrissakes, the DoD was communicating with contractors and academics before this guy was probably even in high school.

Misinterpretation of Chomsky's statement, I think

[jbeach]

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.

Moving the goalposts

[Dave Emami]

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.

Wow...

[laughingbovine]

I was going to say "That's nice, who cares?" but damn.

There's only one problem

[WhitetailKitten]

Neither Chomsky or Ayyadurai seem to have heard of RFCs.

Chomsky: Truth Detective

[pfg23]

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.

Noam Chomsky????

[Somebody is Grar]

Well there's an endorsement all but guaranteed to remove all credibility.

I had email in 1977

[multicsfan]

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).