MIT Lecturer Defends His Standing As Email Inventor 249
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."
Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but Chuck Norris was the first one to use it.
oh, and ..
In Soviet Russia email patents YOU!
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Only after Bruce Lee showed him how. Twice.
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Only after Bruce Lee showed him how. Twice.
And the art of communicating without email.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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So what he *really* invented was the dorky use of capslock .
. .
this entitles him to share a cell in hell with the inventor of the blink tag . . .
hawk
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How this 1978 guy's claim has any legs I don't get.
What precisely is his claim? The Washington Post article gives no objectionable direct quotes. The internet evolution article quotes him as saying, "I did not claim that I created electronic communications". Shiva's web site says, "he was offered a position [...] to develop the world's first EMAIL System". It doesn't say electronic communication system, and it uses all caps to indicate the name of his program. Perhaps the Washington Post and Times journalists were sloppy and just used sensationalist headlines.
True but stupid. If I write a program called THE WHEEL, I could truthfully claim to have invented THE WHEEL but this barely makes it as an "in joke" among friends, and I would justifiably look like an idiot if I published magazine articles about it.
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Good point. (Score:5, Interesting)
Many DIFFERENT items go into a modern email system.
Tomlinson "invented" the practice of using the @ sign.
Ayyadurai may have been the first person to use the term "email".
But there is no evidence that he invented the concept of electronic messages between people.
Re:Good point. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Good point. (Score:5, Informative)
He is playing a ridiculous semantic game. If you look at his website, he never claims to have invented "email". He claims only to have invented "EMAIL", which is technically correct, in that he did create a program called "EMAIL". He even goes so far as to admit that the word "email" was in use previously, but that he was the first to use the word "EMAIL".
He's a tool, and his website makes it obvious.
Re:Good point. (Score:4, Funny)
Yes, I had a fridge (and stove) with EMAIL written on it in big chromed letters in the 1970s. Maybe that's where the "internet fridge" meme came from :)
Re:Good point. (Score:5, Informative)
Ayyadurai may have been the first person to use the term "email".
Nope; that was probably BBN Mercury in 1965. Every important component to e-mail can be found by that year [multicians.org]; that page even specifically debunks this bozo at the top. Like a lot of things, the minute electronic mail became feasible to build, e-mail was built by multiple people. All the requirements were in place the minute a community of people on time-shared computers existed. The number of independent creations of the same thing during a short time period show it was really an obvious next step the minute two people could use the same computer.
Re:Good point. (Score:4, Informative)
Wow, this self-important wanker even has inventorofemail.com [inventorofemail.com]. The Boston interview [boston.com] seems to state his weak-ass case the best. When faced with Tomlinson's 1971 record, he says that isn't really e-mail. Apparently he thinks that some subset of having folders or blind carbon copy are somehow amazing innovations, the things that made his work modern e-mail while earlier ones were not. Whatever.
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Re:Good point. (Score:5, Informative)
BCC was present in RFC680, from 1975. The Unix V6 mail program didn't explicitly have mail folders, but from what I can tell of the man page for the Unix V6 mail command ( http://man.cat-v.org/unix-6th/1/mail [cat-v.org] ), the notion that mail could stored somewhere other than the .mail file in the home directory did exist in 1975. The Unix V7 mail command (you can find its man page at http://plan9.bell-labs.com/7thEdMan/v7vol1.pdf [bell-labs.com] on page 112) most certainly does support saving mail to multiple mailbox files (and what is an mbox file but a bloody folder, which is essentially what Thunderbird still uses with an additional index file). It's that basic multiple mbox structure that programs like Elm and Pine would ultimately build on top of. MH [wikipedia.org] that appears to be from around 1979 also handles multiple mail folders.
So no, the guy didn't invent bcc or multiple mail folders either. He didn't invent the first GUI mail system, which was probably Xerox's Laurel.
The guy is a liar.
Re:Good point. (Score:5, Insightful)
He's been corrected plenty enough, and he still seems to be shamelessly shilling. When exactly does ignorance become dishonesty?
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So far as I can tell, he has no role in computer history. His program did not inspire the next major stage in email, which was Elm (which pretty much inspired all the later major email programs like Pine, Eudora, Pegasus and so forth), and I think Elm, with its continued compatibility with the mbox format (which in turn dates back to the early 1970s) indicates a pretty clear line of descent.
He wrote an email program in 1978. At best that makes it an offshoot of the development of said systems, an evolutiona
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His bit about "to, from and BCC" in this Boston article is completely bogus. Just see RFC 680 [ietf.org] (from 1975) and notice that all of them were completely specified.
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But there is no evidence that he invented the concept of electronic messages between people.
I think some guy called Samuel Morse might have a prior claim on this one.
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Is that how he got ASN [wikipedia.org] 1?
Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
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Sure do!
thirdi!peter@pyramid.com
Ah, those were the days!
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, you've sure got a lot of digits in your slashdot ID for someone who once had a bang path! :) ...!apple!darkside!xtifr
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
For example, I have mastered HTML and gaining proficiency in Visual Basic 6. I am 12 years old and my penis is large enough not to be considered a micropenis by only a few millimeters. Of course, at my level of Slashdot inexperience, my words should be taken with a grain of salt.
A person like Xtifr however, he received a blowjob for Ada Lovelace and can speak machine code in to a processor and hear the results coming out of the other end. He is older than most trees, and has the Unix beard to prove it. If he ever manages to get his elderly penis erect, we have solved our space elevator problem. Every word he speaks is handed down to Moses on stone tablets and entered in to Slashdot with care.
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Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense :-) I drive a truck, have forgotten most of my IT related knowledge, and my UID is lower than his. I also have no beard, use a Mac, and have never managed to monetize any IT chops I may have once possessed.
In my defense, I do possess an original boxed set of SCO Xenix manpages and 3.5" diskettes, as well as a copy of the original Softlanding Linux distro on same media. :-)
Re: (Score:3)
But what about dick size?
What do you think is the reason that he has to drive a truck?
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, he is the Most Interesting Programmer in the World.
"Friends, I don't always use parametric polymorphism, but when I do, I prefer hand-rolled Assembly."
Re: (Score:3)
I know your joking, but I've been reading slashdot since before they even had a login system, and at first refused to get an account because I did not want to be tracked. When I finally gave in, I went through two or three accounts before I could remember one after a few months.
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Re:Maybe... (Score:4, Informative)
doesn't anyone remember bang paths?
What a nightmare. Like posting a letter and having to tell the post office what to do with it: "Take it from the postbox to the Bradford sorting office centre. From the Bradford sorting office take it to the Leeds regional centre. From the Leeds Regional centre send it to the London Regional centre. From the London regional centre take it to the Sunbury sorting office. Take it from the Sunbury sorting office to 12 bog-trotter terrace".
And to think we actually used that!
Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Which he didn't. The ancestor of the mail systems used on the Internet today was the mail command from the original versions of Unix, way back around 1971 or so. This guy is either a lunatic or a liar, but the one thing he isn't is the inventor of email.
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Informative)
I was referring to Unix-style email, which is the granddaddy of most the email passed around today. By 1973 there was RFC 561, which was, so far as I'm aware the first description of a proper ARPANET text message.
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:4, Informative)
I find it amusing that the incomplete 1971 ancestor to RFC561, RFC196 [faqs.org] "A Mail Box Protocol", already includes the concept that instead of a full mail program you might just telnet somewhere and speak the mail protocol to that.
Re: (Score:2)
heck if you want to go down to the "stone age" version then a TELEGRAM would be considered the first "email" since it was the first transmitted media to have the basic format (you sent the telegram to a location addressed to a person)
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Funny)
Dude, you're talking about the mail command versus email -- E mail! Don't you know that if you take something that already exists and put an e or an i in front of it, it's completely new computer wizardry? The entire USPTO is based around this concept. Anyone with a UID of fewer than seven figures should know this stuff.
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Funny)
iAgree
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iAgree
eSright
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Ah, if I had mod points, I could mod you iNteresting or iNsightful.
cheers,
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Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:4, Informative)
...for the record, what he did appear to contribute (or at least copyright) was the word 'EMAIL', although 'electronic mail' existed as early as 1965.
This claim in itself is fishy. You can't copyright "terms." That's not what copyright is for. Copyright is for individual works. He could have copyrighted his source code (in fact it was automatically copyrighted as soon as he wrote it), but there's no way he could claim ownership of a "term" other than by trademarking it. Some bad reporting happened somewhere along the line, here, and now it's getting regurgitated all over the Interwebs.
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Unfortunately, those trademarks were actually filed after this guy claims he invented the term EMAIL. But you're onto something. Here's an issue of Popular Mechanics [google.com] from August 1983 where, on page 107, it says very clearly: "Both The Source and CompuServe (the two largest computer networks) ... began their services by offering electronic mail (called EMAIL on CompuServe and SMAIL on The Source)..." So not only was CompuServe more than likely operating a nationwide email network before 1982, but it actuall
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Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:4, Informative)
Here's Popular Science from September 1980 [google.com], though unfortunately they don't call it "email" -- they abbreviate it "EM."
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Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Interesting)
It is the craziness of the mass media that translates a copyright filing as "Invention".
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
From TFA: VA Shiva Ayyadurai claims is to have created the first "graphical front end for an electronic mail system",
Which is still wrong. Even the piece about the "To:" and the use of user'@'host which existed in RFC469 around 74, reaffirmed in RFC498, and the Mail Transfer Protocol RFC772 dated 1980 which kicked off the the modern internet version of SMTP, none of which include VA Shiva's name, btw. I suppose all the programs that were running at that time that generated the need for those RFCs had no "graphical front end" for the electronic mail that they were serving?
and was the first to copyright the term "EMAIL". It is the craziness of the mass media that translates a copyright filing as "Invention".
Now that one I can believe, but whether it's a leg
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:4, Interesting)
The first GUI email claim seems a little questionable to me. The Xerox Alto (1973) had a GUI, WYSIWYG, mice, ethernet, and email (Laurel and Hardy). I can't find a date reference for Laurel and Hardy, but Steve Jobs visited them in December of 1979 and later said:
And they showed me really three things. But I was so blinded by the first one I didn't even really see the other two. One of the things they showed me was object orienting programming they showed me that but I didn't even see that. The other one they showed me was a networked computer system...they had over a hundred Alto computers all networked using email etc., etc., I didn't even see that. I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life. Now remember it was very flawed, what we saw was incomplete, they'd done a bunch of things wrong. But we didn't know that at the time but still though they had the germ of the idea was there and they'd done it very well and within you know ten minutes it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this some day.
Re: (Score:2)
A single word is not copyrightable. It's possible he was the first to *trademark* the term, though.
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Copyright Registration Number: TXu000111775 - EMAIL [loc.gov]
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According to the legal definition, a single general term is not copyrightable, however a non-generic term is.
That's not true. You can't copyright any single term, just like you can't copyright the title of a book.
Read the text of that claim you cite. The work's title is "EMAIL." The actual work being submitted is the text of a computer printout, i.e. the source code of his email program.
Re:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Doesn't believe in patents (Score:5, Informative)
His name is on three separate patents; are these "software patents?" (Presumably he has had a change of mind.)
6,718,368 System and method for content-sensitive automatic reply message generation for text-based asynchronous communications
6,718,367 Filter for modeling system and method for handling and routing of text-based asynchronous communications
6,668,281 Relationship management system and method using asynchronous electronic messaging
Source: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-adv.htm&r=0&p=1&f=S&l=50&Query=in%2FShiva+and+in%2FAyyadurai+&d=PTXT [uspto.gov]>
Patents... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd love to test our Social Networking application we ran in college, long before this interweb thing came along, against some of the patents people are claiming now.
As for email, I've got junk from my Dad's Model 14 Teletype, with headers and all, which could certainly pass for early email. Back then it was passed between stations until intended recipient was expected to have received it - your TTY was always expected to be left on.
Uh, 1980? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I got to MIT in 1979 email had been in use for a long time. Both " at " and "@" were in equal use on ITS to send mail over ARPAnet via NCP. I'm not sure what this guy is claiming about having invented email in 1980.
Re:Uh, 1980? (Score:5, Funny)
According to Time, he's also the King of Mars and Jennifer Aniston's husband. Not a bad life.
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But did you call it "email"?
The first NYT reference I can find is William Safire's On Language [blogspot.com] column November 27, 1983, where it is presented as a fairly new term.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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Any time you have a multi-user system the need for e-mail arises naturally and just about every multi-user system in the world had it. Before ARPAnet or Internet or DNS.
Really... (Score:2)
This is silly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is silly. (Score:4, Informative)
Quite right. There are a number of different formats. But the most widely used one is based on RFC561 all the way back in 1973 (though I imagine it only formalized what guys like Ray Tomlinson had already been doing for a couple of years). Both UUCP and SMTP were built specifically with this basic format in mind, since by the time they were developed, it had been in use for years.
Unix V6 (Score:2)
Unix Version 6, released in 1975, had the mail command.
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The mail command dates back to v1. And the earliest RFC (561) stating the structure of ARPANET mail messages dates back to 1973. That's talking about direct ancestors of modern mail systems based on RFC 822. But just about any modern email program would be able to open up an RFC 561 formatted message and display it correctly.
More details (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai#Email_claims [wikipedia.org]
1) He did not invent it.
2) He did copyright the term "EMAIL" in 1982.
3) But he doesn't believe in software patents.
Now he is trying to twist his "copyright on "EMAIL"" into "Invention of EMAIL" with nothing more than his own words.
Wake me up when Dennis Ritchie returns to whoop his undeserving ass...
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2) He did copyright the term "EMAIL" in 1982. .
What does that mean? How do you "copyright" a single word? I could understand if he applied for a trademark on the word "EMAIL", but I don't understand the claim of "copyrighting" the word "EMAIL". Does that mean using the word "EMAIL" is copyright infringement?
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And how did he copyright it? Register it? Send himself registered mail with the word "email" in the envelope. I think he's a liar from top to bottom. ARPANet email had been around for over a decade by the time of this alleged copyrighting, and older email systems had been around several years before the Unix V1 mail command.
Re:More details (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Wikipedia article linked above, he copyrighted his email program which was called "EMAIL". So the copyright is on the software, not the term, which as numerous people here have mentioned is not eligible for copyright.
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I did some digging. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, you can't "copyright a term."
Here's his actual claim. [loc.gov] What he did was register the copyright on his software. The title of his software is "EMAIL." That doesn't give him any kind of rights to the term, and it is not proof that he was the first one to use the term, either. There could have been a thousand software systems that called themselves that -- there just isn't a government record to prove it. Either A.) they didn't register their copyrights w
AUTODIN (Score:3, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Digital_Network [wikipedia.org]
http://jproc.ca/crypto/autodin.html [jproc.ca]
I managed a few Technical Control sites long ago. We could route normal telegrams on the system with a little creative address routing.
CTSS 1965, Multics (Score:2, Informative)
"CTSS had mail and inter-user messaging in 1965. These facilities were useful in the initial construction of Multics. Multics provided mail and inter-user messaging between users on the same system as early as 1968. Extending mail on a single system to mail across the network was a development effort started in the early 70s that continued into the 1990s.
THVV wrote the first mail command for 645 Multics in 1968, imitating the CTSS MAIL command. "
Etc.
http://multicians.org/mx-net.html#tag22
See 3.3.2
A fake pumping himself up (Score:2)
Good grief - looks to me like somebody trying to re-write history.
Look at:
http://www.vashiva.com/inventing_email.asp [vashiva.com]
Got his own web site pumping himself.
Then:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Ayyadurai [wikipedia.org]
A wiki page that many have said needs to be deleted.
I wonder who wrote that little work?
Maybe Big Brother can get him a job
working for the Thought Police!
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What I can't figure out is how the piece of shit thought he wouldn't be outed? If he's so fucking smart, he must surely have realized that all the information showing him to be a conman can be found in about five minutes.
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Did I Miss Something? (Score:2)
Electronic Mail described in 1957 (Score:5, Informative)
This NYTArticle [nytimes.com] from April 28, 1957 says:
Mail Sped by Electronics Predicted by Summerfield; One-Day Delivery Sought Between Any 2 Cities --Many 'Ifs' in Plan ELECTRONIC MAIL SEEN IN A DECADE Senate to Study Bill Full Report Planned 'Pattern' for Country Fire From Two Sides Question of 'Intangibles'
WASHINGTON, April 27--The Post Office Department envisions a five-to-ten-year transition to the electronic age...
RFC 1149 (Score:2)
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At the time, that was a more reliable method.
Shiva Ayyadurai (Score:5, Interesting)
As it happens, I actually knew Shiva in high school (I was one year behind him in Livingston -- class of 1982; he was class of 1981). We lived about 1/4 mile apart, and took the same bus to and from school. We were both science/math geeks.
I do remember (not the details) the project he's talking about. We discussed it on the bus. He did indeed submit it to the Westinghouse Talent Search, and as I recall he got past the first round. It certainly was an interesting project for the time, and my recollection is that he designed it very well and he well deserved to advance. I don't know one way or the other whether he came up with it independently, but he most certainly didn't invent email.
It has been well over a decade since I last saw him.
Inventor of "EMAIL(TM)", not of e-mail (Score:4, Informative)
As he says on his Web site [vashiva.com], he's the "inventor of EMAIL".
He does not, however, say he's the inventor of email or e-mail or electronic mail, so I guess he means he's the inventor of a system named "EMAIL". the copyright he got was for a "COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR Electronic Mail System", which suggests that "EMAIL" was a program that implemented, err, umm, email. [vashiva.com]
He als says "Every software system needs a User's Manual, so did the world's first E-MAIL system. At that time, Shiva was everything on the project: software engineer, network manager, project manager, architect, quality assurance AND technical writer.", so maybe "the world's first E-MAIL system" was the first system that "handled it all" - ARPANET e-mail involved different mail user agents and mail transfer agents on different operating systems, so there wasn't a single "COMPUTER PROGRAM FOR Electronic Mail System".
Or not. A historical overview of the CTSS system, from its fiftieth anniversary [multicians.org], quotes Tom Van Vleck (also cited in another posting [slashdot.org]):
Reference 11 is to Van Vleck's The History of Electronic Mail [multicians.org] (which mentions the copyrighting of "EMAIL" in a parenthetical note at the top of the page) and Errol Morris's New York Times Opinionator blog post "Did My Brother Invent E-Mail With Tom Van Vleck?" (my head asplode when I learned that Errol Morris was Noel Morris' brother). [nytimes.com]
The news article he cites [vashiva.com] says he "created an electronic mail system", which may well be the case. It doesn't say he created the first electronic mail system, and "created an electronic mail system" suggests that the notion of an "electronic mail system" wasn't a Shiny New Idea (and, in fact, it wasn't).
And, in fact, the article to which the "to defend his standing as email's creator" link takes you [internetevolution.com] quotes him as saying "I did not claim that I created electronic communications," so at least give him credit for that.
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If you could send missives over a computer network, and another person could read them at some point in the future, that's email. This fellow is implying he invented THAT functionality. That is classical email.
The correct claim, it seems, is that he created one of the early email-management programs.
The use of all caps versus mixed case only usually matters to compilers. In written English, EMAIL versus email contains no difference in conveyed information. Unless one is an acronym and no one is making that
espam (Score:2)
I first used an email like system in 1980 on an IBM mainframe. I was referred to as mail, but not "email". I think at best he might be able to say he was the first to coin the silly term "email". I see no more reason to use the "e" as we don't refer to the network as "electronic". No doubt others might already be using words like "iMail" (Steve, is that you?) or "cmail" or "nmail".
Who cares, though. It all became worthless as soon as spam (all lower case) was invented a few days afterwards.
how do we differentiate different email systems? (Score:2)
The real beginning of email (Score:4, Informative)
The real beginning of email, in the sense of fully automatic message switching, was "Western Union Plan 55-A" [wikipedia.org], introduced in 1948 and shut down in 1976. Imagine Sendmail, with paper tape punches and readers with bins between them as the buffers. Such systems handled most telegrams in the US for over 25 years.
There were message switching systems before that, but Plan 55-A was the first one that could forward a message from source to destination without human intervention at the switching points. It could even handle messages with multiple destination addresses.
Before that, there were teletypewriter exchanges, but they involved dialing up a connection directly between sender and receiver. They were basically telephone switches repurposed for teletypes. That's what TWX and Telex were. Those were automatic dial back to the early 1930s.
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Everybody know's the when Al Gore was a congressman he invented the internet...
And while he was at it, Al Gore invented his namesake--algorithms!