Updated 2/27, 1:25 p.m. The IT world, bound as it is to computer science, loves to track and credit specific innovations. So it's not surprising that outrage ensues when the credit is misplaced -- or seems to be.
This truth came home to me when I read last week's Washington Post article about the "inventor of email." Or, I should clarify, after I read the original article following a series of impassioned complaints about it on an email forum to which I subscribe.
The article discusses how the Smithsonian Institution has acquired documentation showing that VA Shiva Ayyadurai, a former MIT student (now a graduate of that institution who's been a lecturer there), invented email when he was a 14-year-old high schooler in Livingston, N.J. The paper explains how Ayyadurai donated his archival work to the Smithsonian after a profile in Time Magazine and a few other events spotlighted the situation.
The newspaper does not explain the evolution of events as Ayyadurai describes them: Ayyadurai learned programming in 1978 after taking courses offered to gifted students by an NYU professor. Afterward, as part of an independent study project, Ayyadurai traveled to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey's campus in Newark, where he was commissioned (informally, it seems) to create a system for electronic messaging that incorporated the same user interface deployed in interoffice memos of the time -- fields for "To," "From," "CC," and "Bcc." The system took off among the doctors at the university.
In 1981, since software wasn't patentable by law, Ayyadurai copyrighted the term "EMAIL" (note the all caps).
So, VA Ayyadurai claims to have invented the first UI to include interoffice memo features, the predecessor to popular email systems. And as one forum commenter wrote, the reference in all capitals seems to safeguard any claims against Ayyadurai's copyrighting the general term.
After the WaPo story went live, the paper issued a clarification distinguishing the claim to copyrighting a term from the claim to have actually invented email. But the headline stands.
Despite the lukewarm retraction, it didn't take much for the Washington Post headline and the Time Magazine article (see cover shot below) to generate a firestorm of negative comments. Some relatively mild samples from the WaPo message board include "Obviously V.A. Ayyadurai is both telepathic and able to project his breakthrough ideas backward in time!" and "This is a bug [sic] problem with the Internet as a reference source - false stories like this tend to spread."
Photo by Donna Coveney.
The online forum where I first spotted the story was no kinder, but there participants attempted to illustrate the many instances of email predating Ayyadurai's work, including the Arpanet project, a predecessor to today's Internet.
One commenter summarized the situation:
Email/message systems were started very early in the late 60's and by 1978 they were all over the place with companies and universities using them. To put out a newspaper article that someone in 1978 had sort of invented the field was a bit much for many old timers. Since that message lots of comments have appeared on the Washington post article and the paper has made corrections and realized that a copyright of a single program is not a trademark for the term.
For his part, VA Ayyadurai is unfazed and unrepentent. "I did not claim that I created electronic communications," he told me on the phone today. He says the veracity of his claim is "for historians to validate." He invites scrutiny of the records at the Smithsonian, which will be archived in that organization's National Museum of American History.
On Friday, February 24, that museum issued a statement that describes why Ayyudaurai's materials were collected:
In accepting these objects, the museum did not claim that Ayyadurai was “the inventor of email,” as some press accounts have alleged.
Exchanging messages through computer systems, what most people call “email,” predates the work of Ayyadurai. However, the museum found that Ayyadurai’s materials served as signposts to several stories about the American experience.
Those stories also have little to do with Ayyadurai directly. According to the museum, "One important story these materials document relates to computer education... A second story relates to the role of computers in medicine." The museum says Ayyadurai's records were worth collecting because he attended an interesting program at NYU in the 1970s and worked on an email system for doctors in New Jersey (which won him, along with many other students with separate projects, a 1981 Westinghouse Science Talent Search award).
VA Ayyadurai sees his story as one of bootstrap innovation. He says many people are skeptical that a 14-year-old could create such a compelling invention. And he does not regret that he was unable to patent it. "I do not frankly believe in software patents," he said today. In his view, if he had tried to patent the technology he created, further innovation, including modern email systems such as Gmail and Hotmail, would have been stifled.
Thus VA Ayyadurai has painted a target on his back. And a small but vociferous cadre of geeks stand ready to shoot.
The posts in this thread by Sassy, broberts, Chloe, and LPMichelson seem to have been written by the same individual. More interesting than comment spam, at least.
I continue to be disappointed that Mr. Crocker and his associates act as if their place in Internet history is at grave risk if they are unsuccessful in discrediting the work of Shiva Ayyadurai, a 14-year old student who dazzled me and my scientific computing organization at a health sciences institution in Newark, New Jersey circa 1978. Although the rhetoric appears to be a tad more mellow in light of the accumulating and abundant evidence supporting Shiva's work, the attacks continue.
We have been recently treated to the argument, as one example, that EMAIL- the name we used for the umbrella system (and user interface name) supporting the electronic interoffice inter-organizational mail system is actually different from software that has been subsequently developed and variously named email, Email, eMail or some other combination of case designed for stylistic purpose. Imagine if our spoken language required us to insert a "shift" prefix in order to convey meaning. I believe I am posting to a blog, not a Blog which could be something else.
Shiva does not claim to be an Internet Pioneer- in fact, he and the rest of us in my lab worked w/o any knowledge of the ARPAnet or intimate knowledge of work being done on intra- and inter-machine messaging. We knew it was possible- we had built a network at the time that had the middleware capabilities to support basic communication and, most important, a vision of high-level production environment to replace and add value to printed interoffice, inter-organizational and intercampus mail. We called it EMAIL.
The fact that we didn't immediately promote our work or publish in some scholarly journal doesn't mean it didn't happen or it is somehow to be discounted. You can try to ignore history, but not forever.
It oftentimes takes decades if not much, much longer to get history straight. We've all been reminded recently that one of the worst commercial disaster in transportation history- the sinking of the RMS Titanic- an event studied for 100 years, leaves many questions unresolved. It takes time to unearth all of the facts. Some information is reported and verified immediately and remains uncontested; some of it takes much longer. In this case, the information has been unearthed. It is time to put the debate on email to rest and for everyone's sake stop here and now the attacks and bigotry that have no place in this discourse.
Email, upper case, lower case, any case is email: the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, consistent with the features we all use today. And email, was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old boy working in Newark, NJ.
The facts speak for themselves: http://www.inventorofemail.com .
Mr. Crocker and his friends have gotten their due credit. But they did not invent email. Let's get over it.
I can't believe "Crock" thinking he can fool all of us with his dismissive posting of the invention of email by Ayyadurai. Crocker: Wake up --- your not fooling anyone anymore --- you old geezers did not invent email --- stop misusing the term --- Email was coined, created and developed by a 14-year old in Newark, NJ --- your bogus email history is a continuation of revisionism.
Stop the theatrics ---- your calling Dr. Ayyadurai "theatrical" is like the pot calling the kettle black.
Mr. Crocker as an IT Professional I am appalled by your behavior. You have been the core part of the coterie of nonsensical "historians" like SIGCIS, a cabal who seeks to protect the BBNs and IBMs, and have brutally created this controversy.
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email (http://www.inventorofemail.com), upper case, lower case any case. Period. You and your henchmen at BBN, ARPAnet, etc. did not
How dare you act as though you are some "wise man" above the fray, when you have created this false controversy to protect your "email history". You are NOT an "email" pioneer, the term did not exist prior to 1978. And by YOUR OWN ADMISSION, you had no interest to "emulate the inter-organizational mail system"
Stop the "Crock" and "Bull". Apologize and show us you are still worthy of being in this profession.
For all of the heated postings on your site and the others dealing with email invention, there have also been thoughtful comments. A challenge is to avoid letting the former distract from the latter.
Reviewing the breadth of source material, as well as talking with original participants, is always a good idea. Until recently, none of us knew there were any questions about the origins, nevermind our finding out that no one in the world is really using "email"...
The Internet history of email is well-documented, including records of some open mailing lists from the mid-70s. The invited article I did for the Washington Post summarizes some of the milestones that have been questioned. For example, the memo model with to/from/subject/etc. dates back to the early 1970s.
The emailhistory.org site is compiling a list of comprehensive sources and is developing a consensus-based timeline of milestones for the history. As has been true for such discussions on mailing list groups from the mid-1970s, participation is open and so is the archive. It's interesting to see who participated in the early days and who participates now.
Note that by 1978, email was sufficiently advanced to have had an industry newsletter and the first spam...
With friends like Kim...., who's embarrassing you by evading Bill's points, your not getting brownie points for journalism. Go look at the "friends" of Tomlinson, the "Internet Cabal", who thinks they own the computing history. Go look at his "friend" Van Vleck who altered "History of Electronic Mail http://www.inventorofemail.com/Historical-Revisionism-By-Tom-Van-Vleck.asp to support his "friend". Go look at his "friend" Craig Partridge, Chief Scientist of BBN, who came to Tomlinson's aide, and has been rewriting history to build BBN to some "innovation" giant. Do your homework.
It's disgusting to see that you are dismissing facts again as "friends", and not applying the same yardstick to the "friends" of Tomlinson who have promoted absolute lies for multiple decades. Did you bother to dismiss those "friends" when they attacked Dr. Ayyadurai? NO -- that would have taken courage and journalism.
I can't wait to see you both continue your charade in defending poor journalism on Mr. Riffel's documentary.
Can you share with your readers who your advertisers are?
Does it not trouble you that the Internet Hall of Fame was planned for several years, and the timing announced before the time period you're talking about? Are you not shaken in your convictions by the number of independent, well-known figures who would need to have conspired with BBN, or pulled the wool over the Internet Society's eyes?
Are you not disturbed by the absolute absence of any evidence whatsoever that the Internet Hall of Fame is anything other than what it claims to be?
I guess not.
I don't know who invented email. I am just amazed at some of the claims made on this thread by Dr Ayyadurai's supposed friends. With friends like these...
Kim, Dr. Ayyadurai is the inventor of email (read his personal statement on http://www.inventorofemail.com and the false claims, they are well-documented with primary references, some of which I've checked --- it's real) Ayyadurai got screwed by these industry insiders, nearly all of them one way or the other connected to BBN, which has the most to gain by promoting Tomlinson falsely as inventor of email. I think we can agree on that. When you look at the timeline of attacks on Dr. Ayyadurai, you see how between Feb 16 to April 23, in literally a period of less than 8 weeks, these guys went into action to destroy Ayyadurai --- it's a big story --- but since you guys get advertising money from the big guys, probably too hot for you to handle unless you have the courage.
Again, I was not a fan of Ayyadurai, but he was victimized here .
BTW, I've loved your videos and well-researched articles. I really think this deserves a second look.
And, BTW you did give the impression that the InternetHallOfFame was around for 20 years. Glad you acknowledge they put it together in the midst of their crisis.
Whose crisis? The Internet Society had a crisis? Or BBN had a crisis and immediately deployed The Internet Society and a dozen or so independent advisers to fix it for them?
And, that was April 23rd --- NOT May 23rd --- wrong again!
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