'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.'"
Ask a better question (Score:2, Insightful)
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'?
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.
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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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Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Insightful)
A person can be grand at some tasks, like re-inventing linguistics, and a hack in other areas, like pontificating on politics.
Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
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OP mentions it in his reply...
Which of course the AC could not see.
Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Funny)
I love Slashdot. Even when someone is right, they're wrong.
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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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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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Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Insightful)
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/ [guernicamag.com]
Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Interesting)
"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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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 poin
Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
For fuck's sake (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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 l
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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.
Re:Ask a better question (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Ask a better question (Score:5, Insightful)
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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*golf clap*
Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Funny)
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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http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc524 [ietf.org]
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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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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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
Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Insightful)
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
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.
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.
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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 wa
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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 t
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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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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.
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.
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> 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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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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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.
Strange, because the exact spelling of the word "EMAIL" is probably the guy's only related invention. Insofar as I can tell
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It is still nice to remember the old UUCP mail back in those days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#UUCP_for_mail_routing [wikipedia.org]
I will let others debate who really invented email. You have a point there although...
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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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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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Yah, without Morse code, there would be no dot coms
Re:Ask a better question (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
And this is Chomsky in a nutshell (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 [multicians.org] story, though, relevant to this Slashdot article.
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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.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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 [guardian.co.uk]
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,
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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.
Please mod parent up (Score:2)
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".
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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.
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clever troll or genuine crackpot?
you decide
either way, laugh
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LOL!!!
thank you for the smile
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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.
Mumps? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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not any more than I had to...
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]
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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.
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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...
Wiki's evidence is pretty scanty... (Score:2)
...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 [livinginternet.com]
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 profou
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.
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Chomsky relies heavily upon ad hominem arguments these days.
It's all about the protocol (Score:3)
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 [theoatmeal.com]. 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 (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.
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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.
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> 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 a
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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 m
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> 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 via
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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
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> There is a certain value to making something actually work.
He can't claim credit for that either.
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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 "manufacturi
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(Please forget everything you learned from the Oatmeal about Tesla and Edison [forbes.com]. 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 [theoatmeal.com].
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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.
more importantly (Score:2)
who invented Noam Chomsky?
I mean as some sort of authority figure
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The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.
--Dalai Lama
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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
This again? (Score:2)
His website has comments on the main page. (Score:2)
Hate and Envy (Score:2)
This is soooo not worth anyone's time... (Score:2)
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
Industry Insiders? (Score:3)
As 'any fule kno' - (Score:3)
It was "net mail" prior to 1978, but e-mail still. (Score:2)
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
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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 MsgGro
I sent my first e-nmail in 1977 (Score:2)
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 prim
If this is the oulandish claims thread. (Score:3)
I am the second Emperor of the United States, Norton II.
forgot his title (Score:2)
Noam Chomsky, renowned internet expert.
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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,
Even Chomsky is just talking about the name (Score:2)
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 sh
Re:Relevance (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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"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
Cointage is not invention (Score:2)
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.
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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.