'Inventor of Email' Gets Support of Noam Chomsky 288
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.'"
Re:Ask a better question (Score:5, Informative)
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.
wikipedia covers the history nicely (Score:5, Informative)
Most of my immediate rants are captured already:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#Email_claims [wikipedia.org]
Chomsky's "facts" are as wrong as Ayyadurai's (Score:5, Informative)
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:And this is Chomsky in a nutshell (Score:5, Informative)
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:It's all about the protocol (Score:5, Informative)
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:Ask a better question (Score:0, Informative)
Did you even bother to read the article or the facts presented?
Shiva is not claiming to have invented the concept of electronic mail. He is claiming to have invented the first "full-scale, inter-organizational electronic mail system". What don't you understand about that? Here, let me make it clear:
MAIL SYSTEM
His mail system was unfortunately named "EMAIL", which has led to hundreds of neckbeard trolls being confused and attacking him.
Get off your high horse and read the actual claims. Ignore the name "EMAIL" and instead call it "EMAILSYSTEM", maybe that will help you calm down and act in a reasonable manner.
Re:Ask a better question (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Ask a better question (Score:2, Informative)
No. He didn't invent linguistics. He perhaps invented a naive approach to linguistics that only really makes sense when applied to machines.
Re:Ask a better question (Score:5, Informative)
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.