MIT Lecturer Defends His Standing As Email Inventor

hapworth writes "IT professionals were recently outraged to hear that the Smithsonian acquired some code from MIT lecturer VA Shiva Ayyadurai who has convinced no less august pubs than Time Magazine and The Washington Post that he invented email. While objectors howl on forums and message boards, VA Shiva Ayyadurai spoke up today to defend his standing as email's creator, claiming he doesn't regret not patenting it because he doesn't believe in software patents."

Re:Doesn't believe in patents

[Samantha Wright]

Oh yes, he sure did. In 1982. When every computer on the network already had networked mail services. Electronic mail was invented before this clown was even born. [multicians.org] Let the burning at the stake proceed forthwith.

This is silly.

[SuricouRaven]

What is email? It isn't a protocol - you can send it over many, many protocols. It is a concept: The very idea of sending a text message by electronic means to be stored somewhere the recipient may access it for a non-realtime conversation. What is that, really? It's the telegraph. Computers made it much faster, cheaper and more accessible, but the real core of the idea is as old as the telegraph.

Re:Good point.

[MightyMartian]

Even if he is the first to use the term "email" (which I don't believe), electronic mail messages that even a modern email user would recognize had been in use for the better part of seven years by 1978. The guy is a liar, and he's trying to cover it up with clever semantics games. One can trace the evolution of modern email systems with trivial ease from the Unix version 1 mail command through the RFCs detailing out header formats, message body encoding, UUCP and SMTP transmission protocols right up to RFC2822 in 2001. I don't see this asshat's name on any of the RFCs or as an author of any of the mail variants. He's a liar, or nuts. In either case, if I was MIT, I'd be looking at giving this moron his walking papers.

Re:Get an iphone

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what else ruined the joke? Not being funny.

Re:Maybe...

[Taco Cowboy]

and Ray used it to send e-mail between different machines in 1971 on the ARPANET. How this 1978 guy's claim has any legs I don't get

There are a lot of things claimed by a lot of people but it does NOT mean they are the actual inventors.

As far as I can recall, I've been using "emails" since 1975

If that 1978 guy wants to claim that he invented "email", let him claim

Those of us who know better, know better

Re:A fake pumping himself up

[elo_sf]

He seems to be using a variant of the "big lie" wrapping some pieces of truth in the bigger lie. He does appear to have a valid copyright registration for a computer program entitled "EMAIL." from 1982. He's then taking advantage of the mainstream press' unfamiliarity with copyrights vs trademarks vs patents AND their unfamiliarity with software technology--or even willingness to read something as basic as the wikipedia entry for email to realize that 1982 was late to the party and at best the guy did develop a neat computer program at a young age, but certainly is in no way is the inventor of email as a technology. Shame on the media as much as on him.

Re:Maybe...

[GNUALMAFUERTE]

He claims that he created a program called "email", and he says, it was the first. Well, except for the fact that the Unix mail program dates from '72. And that there are RFCs for protocols referring to electronic mail way before that. If we want to be strict about it, email probably started with the telegraph.

This guy is an idiot looking for attention.

Re:Maybe...

[MightyMartian]

The To:, CC, BCC and subject lines all date back to the early 1970s. He didn't invent any of it. RFC680, from 1975, states all of these.

The guy is a lying sack of shit.

Re:Good point.

[MightyMartian]

He's been corrected plenty enough, and he still seems to be shamelessly shilling. When exactly does ignorance become dishonesty?

Re:Doesn't believe in patents

[WhitetailKitten]

He's sticking to the technical, narrowly-focused truth, but using words that to someone not looking for pedantic technicalities would interpret broadly (and falsely).

VA: Here is my source code for the program I've written, "EMAIL." I'm registering copyright on it.
News: VA, inventor of "EMAIL," blah blah today blah blah.
John Q. Public: Huh, this guy invented email. I thought [AOL|Hotmail|their ISP|Google|Microsoft Outlook] invented email."
Slashdot crowd: WHARRRRRRGAAARRBBLL

Re:Maybe...

[s.petry]

What you mention really is the problem with the IP Patent system as a whole.

Numerous people were inventing things simultaneously back in the day. It was primarily MIT, Berkley, AT&T and a mixture of the Government funded DARPA project and people developing tools to help them do their jobs.

Many of these things on the internet people lay claim to are really copies of what we already had in a physical format. Email came out as the equivalent of the "Mail Room", and "Mail Clerks". UUCP and FTP which came out as the "Courier Services" to get data back and forth. HTTP/HTML, and much more came out as primarily the bulletin board.

Over time, we had to add security and could add niceties. We also had numerous flavors of each utility since people had different ways of solving problems and saw different challenges and risks. Lots of these ended up merged, and many just vanished because a different product was better.

Early on, there were no concerns about patents. Back then, it was copyright rules only. Everyone working on projects knew that what they did was for the betterment of the whole. Patents would have hindered or stopped development. I don't think the Government would have allowed a patent even if it was pushed.

To this day, technical people developing services and software generally despise IP patents. It harms the business and kills growth and improvements. It's only the lawyers and money grubbers that like them.

Do I expect to be able to Copyright and enforce the Copyright on my code, Icons, images, etc..? Absolutely. Do I expect to own the ideas I develop? Hell no. If you can do what I do, go right ahead. I hope you do it better, so that I'm challenged to improve myself.