A google search for “Who invented email” returns the name of an India-born scientist Shiva Ayyadurai who allegedly invented email at the age of fourteen.
Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai was born in Mumbai (Bombay), India. He along with his family left to US at the age of 7. He studied computer programming at New York University and later joined MIT to get four undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in addition to PHD in biological engineering. Shiva as he is popularly known, also founded a company worth $200 million called Echo Mail.
According to various internet sources including Shiva’s own website, at the age of 14 he wrote a software program to automate the conventional paper-based interoffice communication system of University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). While computer to computer communication was already in use, Shiva claims that he was the first to introduce essential email features that we use today in the year 1978. He introduces the email terms like From, To, CC, BCC, Forward, Reply etc in his program.
In the absence of patent laws Shiva applied for copyright for the program called “Email” in 1982. V.A. Shiva still holds the copyright for the program and the term “Email”.
He has been seeking public support for quite some time to strengthen his claim after there has been a controversy on who invented email. He has also published a book called “The Boy Who Invented Email & His 7 Secrets of Innovation” which talks more about his invention.
The controversy: Is Shiva Ayyadurai the man who invented email?
Critics say that in 1982 Shiva just copyrighted the term ’email’ and a program he wrote and that such digital communication between computers existed long before 1978.
In 2011 Time published an interview with Shiva titled “The man who invented Email” crediting him as the inventor of email. Major controversy started when posts related to email invention on The Washington Post and Huffington post were trolled with nasty comments and facts that refuted Shiva’s claim. The Washington Post updated the post and clarified that Dr. V. A. Shiva was not the inventor of email.
Many people credit Ray Tomlinson of Cambridge-based BBN Technologies as the first person who used @ symbol in 1971 to send messages between computer terminals. Later many others built upon Tomlinson’s work and devised their own methods to share information over the network. Shiva claims that those earlier systems and other ARPANET programs were merely a way of simply sending and receiving text messages. His Email program, on the other hand, was invented specifically to replicate paper based mail system used in office electronically and comprised of elements & features which a standard email system today have.
Noam Chomsky professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at MIT supports Shiva’s claim and was quoted by Wired as-
“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”
Chomsky’s argument is that Ayyadurai received a formal copyright registration on his email program in 1982, and that in 1977, David Crocker — who worked on the ARPAnet and has criticized Ayyadurai’s claims — wrote that “no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system.”
“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,”
Whether or not “Dr. E-Mail”, VA Shiva Ayyadurai invented the email, he is an authority on Email technology, e-marketing and biotechnology.
Right now Shiva is busy with his bio-tech startup CytoSolve. CytoSolve has developed the world’s first computational platform for scalable integration of molecular pathway models. You can read more about Shiva on his website, inventor of email, history of email, Wikipedia and make your own judgement. Shiva’s website is full of documents, web references and scanned newspaper clippings that talk about his side of story.
Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Interviewed on CBS TV
Image credit- http://www.inventorofemail.com/
