[SIGCIS-Members] Email was invented by a school boy in 1978 says Washington Post & Time Magazine

Wed Feb 22 15:04:33 PST 2012

Thanks, Chris, for the blog post. It is very useful and well-written. My business card does say "Smithsonian" on it, and I have been known to write about the history of computing and the Internet :-), but I learned about this like everyone else, from the Washington _Post_ on Saturday morning. As I told Tom, I almost choked on my Cheerios when I opened the paper.  I thought of the famous words of Brendan Sullivan, "I am not a potted plant." 

Paul E. Ceruzzi
Chair, Division of Space History
National Air & Space Museum
MRC 311; PO Box 37012
Washington, DC 20013-7012
202-633-2414 
<http://www.nasm.si.edu/staffDetail.cfm?staffID=24> 

-----Original Message-----
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces at sigcis.org] On Behalf Of McDonald, Christopher
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 5:51 PM
To: Thomas Haigh
Cc: members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Email was invented by a school boy in 1978 says Washington Post & Time Magazine

Dear SIGCISers,
I've created a blog post recapping Tom's e-mail from this morning, along with a few additional thoughts and links:

     http://www.sigcis.org/node/321

Please feel free to discuss this topic further on the blog, and to forward it to anyone who's interested.

Best,
Chris McDonald
________________________________________
From: members-bounces at sigcis.org [members-bounces at sigcis.org] On Behalf Of Jon Lindsay [jonrlindsay at gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 4:09 PM
To: Thomas Haigh
Cc: members at sigcis.org
Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Email was invented by a school boy in 1978 says Washington Post & Time Magazine

If anyone knows more about the Smithsonian angle on this, that would be interesting to hear. It's clearly the institute's credibility that the Post is riffing off of for this story, though the newspaper may well have misinterpreted what was really going on. The official website returns an amusing result, given this discussion:
Searched for "Ayyadurai" - Found NO results.

On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Thomas Haigh <thaigh at computer.org<mailto:thaigh at computer.org>> wrote:
Hello everyone,

Did you know that email was invented in 1978 by a 14 year old called V.A. Shiva Ayyadura? The shocking news was broken recently by the Washington Post in what I think was a print story http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/MEPMRJ/NSC4SB/ZCNCKZ/FVLP7K/7278IF/50/h

Time Magazine's website has a blogger who reported the same story on "The Man Who Invented Email." http://techland.time.com/2011/11/15/the-man-who-invented-email/

For most SIGCIS members this story probably does not pass the "sniff test" but to save you looking anything up:

There are two obvious senses in which something could be the "first email system."

1) The first "mail" system to let a user write a message to another user of the same computer system, who could read it when he/she next logged in. This was a step beyond earlier chat/talk capabilities that only allowed instant display of messages. Mail features became common on the timesharing computers of the late 1960s. MIT is a strong contender for the first place where this happened. A series of NY Times blog stories suggested that MIT CTSS in 1965 might have been the first system to include such a mail feature. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invent-e-mail-with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/.<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invent-e-mail-with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/> This seems plausible, though I would not be stunned to learn of an earlier use.

2) The first system to send a message to someone using a DIFFERENT computer, via a network. This appears to have been on the ARPANET in 1971, with initial implementation by Ray Tomlinson. Janet Abbate's book Inventing the Internet includes a solid treatment of this, making clear that "network mail" became the "killer application" for ARPANET even though remote logins had been the application for which it was originally designed.

Craig Partridge gave more technical detail and covered later developments in "The Technical Development of Internet Email" published in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30:2, April-June 2008:3-29. I looked at the commercialization of email in "Protocols for Profit: Web and E-mail Technologies as Product and Infrastructure" in The Internet and American Business, edited by William Aspray and Paul Ceruzzi, MIT Press, 2008: 105-158.

(http://www.tomandmaria.com/tom/Writing/ProtocolsForProfitDRAFT.pdf)

The Washington Post article is unclear of what Ayyadura is supposed to have done . A "clarification" now says that "Ayyadurai holds the copyright to the computer program called "email," establishing him as the creator of the "computer program for [an] electronic mail system" with that name, according to the U.S. Copyright Office." A caption on the story notes that "He holds the copyright to both EMIAL and the term E-mail" which of course is meaningless. They seem to be confusing copyright protection with patent protection, and implying that he would only have copyright on a program he created if it was the first of its kind. I could write a program called "OPERATING SYSTEM" tomorrow and hold the copyright, but it wouldn't mean I invented operating systems. Wouldn't mean I could trademark the term either, which could also be what they are confusing copyright with.

I have to admit that I'm forming an uneasy fascination with V.A. Shiva Ayyadura's website. It's full of new age/cybernetic waffle and extravagant self promotion. He bills himself as "Founder, Chairman and President of the Institute for Integrative Systems" in a video promoting "Turmeric: Wonder Herb of India." There's a "featured article" on "The Theatrics of Healing." He is also "world's foremost authority on integrating systems of medicine." The description on his publications page http://www.vashiva.com/publications.asp of his book "The EMAIL Revolution" is the old placeholder text: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...." His list of "Chapters in Books" includes his 1990 masters

thesis, a paper at "Document Analysis Conference" in 1994 "submitted for publication" and items described only as "Chapter in Communications Arts" and "Chapter on Electrodynamics, Dynamics,".

Meanwhile his page on himself as "the inventor of EMAIL" (http://www.vashiva.com/inventing_email.asp) includes two headings of "First US Copyright for EMAIL, 1982" one above a copyright certificate and once above a 2004 patent for an automated reply system. The kindest thing one can say is that he does consistently capitalize EMAIL, allowing for a legalistic defense that he only means to claim to have invented a program called "EMAIL" rather than the idea of

electronic mail.

On the other hand his poster "The History of EMAIL" http://www.vashiva.com/innovation/email/vashiva-inventor-of-email.asp clearly lays claim to creation of the entire electronic mail concept. Little people graphics show the growth of email users from 2 in 1979 to 3.1 billion today. His 1982 copyright registration looms as a major event. Van Vleck, Tomlinson, etc. appear only as "Pre-EMIAL Innovators."

He appears to claim that everything prior to his system was just "text messaging" and that he was the first to have fields for "to," "from," etc. which is also clearly false. Here's an incoherent Q and A from the Time "interview."

Ray Tomlinson is often credited as the inventor of email. Is he credited correctly, in your opinion, or should he be credited for something else?

Shiva: I think that's the thing that's sort of resulted in this confusion. Since '94, people have always said something's going to kill e-mail-and the latest was text messaging, right? Ray and Tom Van Vleck really did text messaging. In fact, in one of Tom's early communications he says his boss wouldn't let him do electronic letters internally, which is actually the mail piece of it. So they were more focused from a messaging standpoint: How do you get a message from point A to point B to manipulate another machine at that more core level?

What shocks me is that real newspapers could print this kind of thing. Obviously journalists are too busy to read the historical literature. Even calling a historian might take an hour or two to arrange. But are they even incapable of using Wikipedia and Google? Why is the Washington Post employing as the "editor of ideas at innovations" http://www.washingtonpost.com/emi-kolawole/2011/03/02/AB6t4sM_page.html someone who doesn't know the difference between patent, trademark and copyright? Did all the real journalists get downsized? Should we look forward to "William Shatner: the Inventor of Television."

Anyway, it does make me sad about the gap between all the great historical work that has been done by our community and the complete lack of use made of it by the media in this case. Despite a mass of criticism on the comments thread and presumably in emails from readers the Washington Post has done no more that append it's its defensive and absurd "clarification."

Tom

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