'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.'"

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: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.

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.

Re:Ask a better question

[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.

Re:Ask a better question

[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.

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:Ask a better question

[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!

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.)