Slashdot Mirror
'Inventor of Email' Gets Support of Noam Chomsky
Ian Lamont writes "Shiva Ayyadurai, who famously claims to have invented email as a teenager in the 1970s, is back. A statement attributed to Noam Chomsky offers support for Ayyadurai's claim while attacking 'industry insiders' for stating otherwise. The statement reads: 'Given the term email was not used prior to 1978, and there was no intention to emulate "...a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system," as late as December 1977, there is no controversy here, except the one created by industry insiders, who have a vested interest to protect a false branding that BBN is the "inventor of email," which the facts obliterate.'"
Hack like Chomsky? Really? He reinvented linguistics. His influences reach out from compilers to AI to psychology. Hack? Don't judge the man by (your opinion of) his political views.
Chomsky ought to know better, he was certainly an academic in the early 1970s. At any rate, the mail command dates back to 1970-71 and there is a very early RFC detailing an email system. Certainly by 1974-75 the earliest format of what we now call the mbox format was in existence, as was the transport system. This guy created an email system, but his system has nothing to do with the Unix mail system that predates it by several years, and is the progenitor of the UUCP/SMTP systems in place by the mid to late 1970s that were used to broadcast mbox-formatted emails to various organizations.
In short, this guy's email system was neither the first, nor did it have any influence on the Internet's email system. The claim is pure rubbish. For once I wish I was a subscriber because I actually did a detailed investigation of the various RFCs surrounding Unix mail and demonstrated that the guy is full of crap.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You see this pretty often when someone is very smart and makes revolutionary discoveries in their own field. They essentially convince themselves that they are an expert on everything and have opinions worth having about everything. In the case of the Chomsky that's gotten also wound up in his politics and apparent desire for counter-narratives to standard histories especially when the standard versions are primarily about white Westerners. This isn't that dissimilar to how Linus Pauling developed weird ideas about vitamin C, or how Kary Mullis has decided that global warming is a hoax, that ozone depletion is a hoax, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that the Fed Reserve is part of a big conspiracy, and a few other strange ideas besides. None of this should be taken to diminish Chomsky's work in linguistics which was altogether very impressive.
When I started at DEC in 1980 we had a PDP-11 running DEC Standard Mumps that had a program that did email. I believe it was actually called "email" too.
It was not new at the time.
Most of my immediate rants are captured already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#Email_claims
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
It's ridiculous for Chomsky to say only "industry insiders" care about this, and that the reason is they're looking to protect BBN. That is a complete falsehood! The loudest voices speaking against Ayyadurai are from the Society for the History of Technology's Special Interest Group for Computers, Internet, and Society. "SIGCIS" as it's known is the world's leading body of historians in the computer field. (It is not an "Internet cabal" as Boston Magazine recently claimed.) I'm a member; as serious historians the only thing SIGCIS is looking to "protect" is historical context.
I think the guy is trying to use the evidence that he wrote yet-another-stand-alone electronic mail system (nothing new at the time) and named one subroutine email, therefore he invented the term email. Then there's massive water muddying trying to extend being the first to use that word into inventing the current worldwide internet email system and extending into inventing the very concept of email and extending into inventing email programs as a concept. A pretty big stretch.
I'm not sure that naming my stereo amplifier that I built with radio shack parts in 1985 the "iPod", because the stringy wiring reminds me of a bean, necessarily means I invented your ipod touch, or I invented the concept of a mp3 player, I'm not even sure if using the name first is all that relevant other than as a trivia question. Going into full blown PR mode with the PR message being "I invented the ipod in 1985" is more than a bit irresponsible. Just for the record I did build a amp out of radio shack parts more or less of my own design, and it worked at least for awhile, but I never gave it a cool trendy name. Should have named it "facebook".
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If he's still claiming that, then he's still a liar. What could be more inter-organizational than the ARPANet mail system that by 1975 was transmitting mail between US government agencies and academia throughout the US, Canada and Western Europe? The RFCs are there to prove it. ARPANet was distributing email to various organizations and agencies four or five years before this idiot's email program was written.
The guy is full of shit. He's a liar.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)