I am amused that in the article that Dag pointed out, there is this line,

"Ayyadurai has been credited with "inventing" email, but his role in developing the technology behind electronic mail has been disputed,"

in which both "contradictory" sources point to the Washington Post; the pro-Ayyadrai one is a video interview of him talking and the opposing one is a set of corrections to an existing blogpost. Sometimes I feel like modern media is an Ouroboros, just referencing itself.

Speaking of Fran Drescher, this whole incident seems like it could be a parody of a plot from her nineties-era television sitcom "The Nanny," where the self-aggrandizing character Mr. Sheffield has made a fool of himself claiming to have invented e-mail and it's up to the only sane one in the room, the sharp-witted British butler (or in this case our own Tom Haigh, sharp-witted British computer historian) to set things right.

--AMM