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WE WILL NOT BE CHILLED!
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by Tara Carreon
January 30, 2017
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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The Boy Who Invented Email
Honoring the Spirit of Innovation on The Anniversary of Email
by Lawrence E. Weber
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
The First Article in The History of Email Series
In 1978, a 14-year-old boy invented email.
He created a computer program, which he named “email”, that replicated all the functions of the interoffice mail system: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachments, Address Book, etc., the now familiar parts of every email system.
Picture of 14-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai shown with "email" computer program code, from 1978, in the background.
On August 30, 1982, the US government officially recognized V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai as the inventor of email by awarding him the first US Copyright for “Email”, “Computer Program for Electronic Mail System,” for his 1978 invention. This was awarded at a time when Copyright was the only way to protect software inventions.
Official US Copyright Notice for “Email” Issued on August 30, 1982, now, in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (NMAH).
Email, however, emerged from somewhat unlikely circumstances. Email wasn’t created, with a massive research budget, in big institutions like the ARPANET, MIT or the military. Such institutions had thought it “impossible” to create such a system, believing it far too complex.
Shiva was given something that big institutions, however, may have found hard to provide: an ecosystem of loving parents, a wonderful mentor, dedicated teachers and a collegial environment where he was treated as an equal though his colleagues were 20 to 40 years older.
In that ecosystem, Shiva thrived, and the world got email.
An Ecosystem of Love, Caring and Community
That ecosystem of love, caring and community allowed his creativity to blossom. History shows that such ecosystems are ultimately the source from which innovations can continually emerge in a healthy and sustainable manner.
When Shiva was accepted to a special program at New York University (NYU) to study computer science, for example, his mother and a neighbor took turns driving him at 5 AM to Newark’s Penn Station, from where Shiva took the train to NYU.
After finishing the NYU program, another family friend, Martin Feuerman took the initiative to introduce Shiva to Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, then Director of the Laboratory Computer Network (LCN) at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). Shiva’s talent, passion and commitment immediately impressed Dr. Michelson, and he offered Shiva a position as a Research Scholar, and gave him a challenge: to convert the old system of paper-based mail communications used at UMDNJ to an electronic one.
Before Shiva could take on this challenge, he needed approval from his high school. A 14-year-old student traveling thirty miles to Newark, in the middle of school hours, was unprecedented.
But a dedicated teacher, Stella Oleksiak, became Shiva’s advocate. She negotiated with the principal and school administrators at Livingston High School, and convinced them that Shiva was responsible and given this opportunity, he would make an important contribution. The school’s administration acquiesced, and allowed Shiva to travel to Newark, during school hours, to start the project.
Shiva with mentor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson (second from left) and Independent Study teacher Stella Oleksiak (third from left), who convinced school officials to amend rules so Shiva could work in Newark.
The Interoffice Mail System
Shiva began the project at UMDNJ by closely observing the system of operations for transporting mail. He observed how each secretary, using their typewriter, created the interoffice memorandum or “memo” with its “To:”, “From:”, “Subject:”, “Date:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:” fields, and sometimes paper-clipped Attachments.
An example of the Interoffice Memo.
The memo was then placed in an interdepartmental envelope. The interdepartmental envelope had a red string that one used to close the envelope. The name of the recipient was listed on the envelope’s cover. The envelope was then placed in a pneumatic tube container.
Interdepartmental Envelope.
The pneumatic tube container was used to transport the “cargo” of the interoffice memo and any attachments, to its destination, across a complex system of pneumatic tubes that connected the offices.
The interdepartmental mail envelope was placed in a pneumatic tube container for transport from office to office.
Pneumatic tube system, similar to one at UMDNJ, used to transport interoffice mail across offices.
Shiva also observed that the desktop of each secretary, in addition to the typewriter, had an Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Carbon Copy Paper, Folders, Address Book, Paper Clips (for attachments), etc., which they used each day to create and process incoming and outgoing mail.
The typical desktop of a secretary that Shiva observed in 1970s at UMDNJ.
This complex system of office-to-office communications was the interoffice mail system. This system was not unique to UMDNJ but used in nearly every office including those of presidents and prime ministers.
Email is the Electronic Version of the Interoffice Mail System
Shiva conceived an electronic version of this system. He created a computer program of over 50,000 lines of code, which electronically replicated all the features of the interoffice mail system. Shiva then needed to name his computer program.
First page of the computer program showing Shiva’s naming the program “email”, thus defining email to be the electronic interoffice mail system.
The FORTRAN programming language, the language in which Shiva coded his computer program, required all names to be in upper case and the operating system imposed a five-character limit on program names. Given these limitations, he created the word “EMAIL” to name his program, a term never used before in the English language.
At the time of email’s invention, the US government didn’t even have laws to protect the intellectual property rights of inventors of software programs. The Copyright Act of 1976 only protected music and literary works. In 1980, this Act was amended to protect software inventions.
Shiva submitted an application in 1981 to the US Copyright Office along with copies of his email computer code and the User’s Manual to the Library of Congress. By submitting his code and the manual, he made his work publicly available to all. It is therefore no coincidence that other email programs, one after the other, from Eudora, to Lotus Notes to Outlook, emerge after 1982, as the infographic shows.
Infographic of the History of Email.
This is not to say that someone would not have created an electronic version of the interoffice mail system, perhaps even calling it something else, at some point in history; but the facts are that a 14-year-old boy, working in Newark, NJ, was the first to do it, the first to call it “email”, and the first to receive official recognition, for the invention, by the US government.
Prior to 1978, experts and electronic messaging researchers at big institutions, including members of the ARPANET team, thought it “impossible” to create such an electronic inter-organizational mail system. The seminal RAND report, written by David Crocker, a leading ARPANET electronic messaging researcher, makes this unequivocally clear.
Shiva Did What Others Thought Impossible
In December of 1977, Mr. Crocker wrote:
This report was written just a few months before Shiva began his project at UMDNJ.
The big institutions such as the ARPANET, MIT and the military had decided not to even attempt to create an electronic replica of the interoffice mail system. They chose to focus on the simple exchange of text messages between devices, dating back to the lineage of the Morse Code telegraph of the 1800s. Their efforts were the precursors to what we know today as Texting, Chat, and Twitter, the simple exchange of short messages, but certainly not email.
Shiva, however, had a singular focus to create a “full-scale inter-organizational mail system” in order to make the lives of office workers easier. He took into consideration human factors: the system had to be easy-to-use. He created a simple user interface so secretaries, doctors, students, and staff could easily migrate from the typewriter to the keyboard. His system did not need the Internet or ARPANET, but ran on the Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN), already in place at UMDNJ.
In 1981, Shiva received a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Award, known as the “Baby Nobels” for his invention. In his Westinghouse application, the young teenager had a remarkable prescience on the future of email. He wrote in the conclusion of his application:
The 14-year-old boy’s predictions on email all have come true.
Shiva’s example demonstrates that we cannot underestimate the creativity and wisdom of our young people. Nearly 25% of the world’s population is less than the age of 14, and about 50% are below the age of 25.
Excerpt from Westinghouse Science Awards Application, Shiva predicting the future of email. Click on image to download a PDF of the Shiva's Westinghouse Science Awards application.
The World Needs More "Shiva's" and "Philo's"
Jim Clifton of the Gallup Organization, in his book the Jobs War, has concluded that the world needs to create 3.2 billion new jobs within the next 10 years. The current models of innovation rely on massive amounts of capital flowing to a few centers of innovation in major cities, big companies, large universities and the military. However, according to Clifton, these current models for innovation will only create 1.4 billion new jobs.
There is a 1.8 billion new job deficit! Where will these jobs come from?
The recent uprisings across the world may likely be attributed to youth feeling distressed and having little hope for jobs and a future where they can flourish. The journey of that 14-year-old boy working in Newark, NJ reveals an inspiring and alternate model for innovation.
Such models may appear as some brilliant exception, because media simply neither highlight nor report accurately such examples, as a rule.
Philo Farnsworth, for example, conceived TV, also as a 14-year-old child, in 1930, working in his home laboratory, in the small farming town of Franklin, Idaho. Like Shiva, Philo had that same ecosystem of loving parents, a wonderful mentor, and a supportive community.
However, it took many decades for the world to even know this fact, and that too, long after he died. Vested interests, for many decades, reacted and worked hard to hide the facts of Philo being the inventor of television; and such vested interests, also reacted in a similar manner, after news of the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Shiva’s code, papers and artifacts, on February 16, 2012, documenting his invention of email.
Is it so hard for us to believe that brilliant innovations such as email and television can emerge in healthy and sustainable ecosystems beyond the bastions of big universities, large companies and the military?
Modern media has an incredible opportunity to share such facts in a timely manner based on reviewing primary sources, and moving beyond simply accepting the word of “experts”, and the propensity to copy and paste from Wikipedia. Factual reporting of other “Shiva’s” and “Philo’s” is more than just good journalism, but one that can give hope to the emerging 3.5 billion young people, below the age of 25 who deserve accurate narratives on the infinite possibilities for creativity and innovation.
We welcome you to the History of Email Series, and invite you to celebrate the Anniversary of Email, August 30th, and unleash the spirit of innovation!
About Lawrence E. Weber
Larry Weber is the Chairman & CEO of Racepoint Global (http://www.racepointglobal.com), an advanced marketing services agency, world-renowned expert in media and best-selling author. Passionate about the convergence of technology and communications, he is a frequent public speaker on the future of marketing, the social web and building communities online. Larry enjoys helping global brands and emerging companies harness social media strategies to enhance brand reputation, create and extend partnerships, and increase demand generation. He founded one of the industry's first interactive marketing agencies, Thunderhouse, and has worked with world-class clients including ARM, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Cook Medical, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, and many more.
Larry serves on a number of Boards of corporations, non-profit organizations and academic institutions. He is the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX),the world's largest Internet marketing association. Larry has authored four business and marketing books, including The Provocateur: How a New Generation of Leaders Are Building Communities, Not Just Companies (Random House/Crown Business, 2002), business bestseller Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business (Wiley & Sons, 2007, with a second edition in 2009), Sticks & Stones: How Digital Business Reputations Are Created Over Time...And Lost in a Click (Wiley & Sons, 2009), and Everywhere: Comprehensive Digital Business Strategy for the Social Media Era (Wiley & Sons, 2011). Larry's newest book, The Digital Marketer: Ten New Skills You Must Learn to Stay Relevant and Customer-Centric, is due out in Spring 2014.
Honoring the Spirit of Innovation on The Anniversary of Email
by Lawrence E. Weber
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.
The First Article in The History of Email Series
In 1978, a 14-year-old boy invented email.
He created a computer program, which he named “email”, that replicated all the functions of the interoffice mail system: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachments, Address Book, etc., the now familiar parts of every email system.
Picture of 14-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai shown with "email" computer program code, from 1978, in the background.
On August 30, 1982, the US government officially recognized V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai as the inventor of email by awarding him the first US Copyright for “Email”, “Computer Program for Electronic Mail System,” for his 1978 invention. This was awarded at a time when Copyright was the only way to protect software inventions.
Official US Copyright Notice for “Email” Issued on August 30, 1982, now, in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (NMAH).
Email, however, emerged from somewhat unlikely circumstances. Email wasn’t created, with a massive research budget, in big institutions like the ARPANET, MIT or the military. Such institutions had thought it “impossible” to create such a system, believing it far too complex.
Shiva was given something that big institutions, however, may have found hard to provide: an ecosystem of loving parents, a wonderful mentor, dedicated teachers and a collegial environment where he was treated as an equal though his colleagues were 20 to 40 years older.
In that ecosystem, Shiva thrived, and the world got email.
An Ecosystem of Love, Caring and Community
That ecosystem of love, caring and community allowed his creativity to blossom. History shows that such ecosystems are ultimately the source from which innovations can continually emerge in a healthy and sustainable manner.
When Shiva was accepted to a special program at New York University (NYU) to study computer science, for example, his mother and a neighbor took turns driving him at 5 AM to Newark’s Penn Station, from where Shiva took the train to NYU.
After finishing the NYU program, another family friend, Martin Feuerman took the initiative to introduce Shiva to Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, then Director of the Laboratory Computer Network (LCN) at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ). Shiva’s talent, passion and commitment immediately impressed Dr. Michelson, and he offered Shiva a position as a Research Scholar, and gave him a challenge: to convert the old system of paper-based mail communications used at UMDNJ to an electronic one.
Before Shiva could take on this challenge, he needed approval from his high school. A 14-year-old student traveling thirty miles to Newark, in the middle of school hours, was unprecedented.
But a dedicated teacher, Stella Oleksiak, became Shiva’s advocate. She negotiated with the principal and school administrators at Livingston High School, and convinced them that Shiva was responsible and given this opportunity, he would make an important contribution. The school’s administration acquiesced, and allowed Shiva to travel to Newark, during school hours, to start the project.
Shiva with mentor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson (second from left) and Independent Study teacher Stella Oleksiak (third from left), who convinced school officials to amend rules so Shiva could work in Newark.
The Interoffice Mail System
Shiva began the project at UMDNJ by closely observing the system of operations for transporting mail. He observed how each secretary, using their typewriter, created the interoffice memorandum or “memo” with its “To:”, “From:”, “Subject:”, “Date:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:” fields, and sometimes paper-clipped Attachments.
An example of the Interoffice Memo.
The memo was then placed in an interdepartmental envelope. The interdepartmental envelope had a red string that one used to close the envelope. The name of the recipient was listed on the envelope’s cover. The envelope was then placed in a pneumatic tube container.
Interdepartmental Envelope.
The pneumatic tube container was used to transport the “cargo” of the interoffice memo and any attachments, to its destination, across a complex system of pneumatic tubes that connected the offices.
The interdepartmental mail envelope was placed in a pneumatic tube container for transport from office to office.
Pneumatic tube system, similar to one at UMDNJ, used to transport interoffice mail across offices.
Shiva also observed that the desktop of each secretary, in addition to the typewriter, had an Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Carbon Copy Paper, Folders, Address Book, Paper Clips (for attachments), etc., which they used each day to create and process incoming and outgoing mail.
The typical desktop of a secretary that Shiva observed in 1970s at UMDNJ.
This complex system of office-to-office communications was the interoffice mail system. This system was not unique to UMDNJ but used in nearly every office including those of presidents and prime ministers.
Email is the Electronic Version of the Interoffice Mail System
Shiva conceived an electronic version of this system. He created a computer program of over 50,000 lines of code, which electronically replicated all the features of the interoffice mail system. Shiva then needed to name his computer program.
First page of the computer program showing Shiva’s naming the program “email”, thus defining email to be the electronic interoffice mail system.
The FORTRAN programming language, the language in which Shiva coded his computer program, required all names to be in upper case and the operating system imposed a five-character limit on program names. Given these limitations, he created the word “EMAIL” to name his program, a term never used before in the English language.
At the time of email’s invention, the US government didn’t even have laws to protect the intellectual property rights of inventors of software programs. The Copyright Act of 1976 only protected music and literary works. In 1980, this Act was amended to protect software inventions.
Shiva submitted an application in 1981 to the US Copyright Office along with copies of his email computer code and the User’s Manual to the Library of Congress. By submitting his code and the manual, he made his work publicly available to all. It is therefore no coincidence that other email programs, one after the other, from Eudora, to Lotus Notes to Outlook, emerge after 1982, as the infographic shows.
Infographic of the History of Email.
This is not to say that someone would not have created an electronic version of the interoffice mail system, perhaps even calling it something else, at some point in history; but the facts are that a 14-year-old boy, working in Newark, NJ, was the first to do it, the first to call it “email”, and the first to receive official recognition, for the invention, by the US government.
Prior to 1978, experts and electronic messaging researchers at big institutions, including members of the ARPANET team, thought it “impossible” to create such an electronic inter-organizational mail system. The seminal RAND report, written by David Crocker, a leading ARPANET electronic messaging researcher, makes this unequivocally clear.
Shiva Did What Others Thought Impossible
In December of 1977, Mr. Crocker wrote:
"At this time, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system. The fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users' needs."
— Crocker, David. Framework and Function of the "MS" Personal Message System. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1977.
Since the system is to be used for communication which is exemplified in older and heavily-exercised technology, it is assumed that users have an extensive conceptual model of the communication domain. It is further assumed that a system which performs in ways which deviate from that model will be viewed as "idiosyncratic" and impeding the efforts of the user. Problems occurring during this sort of interaction can be expected to be as irritating as having a pen which leaks or a typewriter with keys that jam. Therefore, a major design goal for MS is to provide an integrated set of necessary and sufficient functions which conform to the target user's cognitive model of a regular office-memo system. At this stage, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale inter-organization mail system....
The level of the MS project effort has also had a major effect upon the system's design. To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible with MS. In addition, the fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to users' needs. Consequently, important segments of a full message environment have received little or no attention and decisions have been made with the expectation that other Unix capabilities will be used to augment MS. For example, MS has fairly primitive data-base management (i.e., filing and cataloging) facilities and message folders have been implemented in a way which allows them to be modified by programs, such as text editors, which access them directly, rather than through the message system.
-- Framework and Functions of the "MS" Personal Message System: A Report prepared for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, by David H. Crocker
This report was written just a few months before Shiva began his project at UMDNJ.
The big institutions such as the ARPANET, MIT and the military had decided not to even attempt to create an electronic replica of the interoffice mail system. They chose to focus on the simple exchange of text messages between devices, dating back to the lineage of the Morse Code telegraph of the 1800s. Their efforts were the precursors to what we know today as Texting, Chat, and Twitter, the simple exchange of short messages, but certainly not email.
Shiva, however, had a singular focus to create a “full-scale inter-organizational mail system” in order to make the lives of office workers easier. He took into consideration human factors: the system had to be easy-to-use. He created a simple user interface so secretaries, doctors, students, and staff could easily migrate from the typewriter to the keyboard. His system did not need the Internet or ARPANET, but ran on the Wide Area Network (WAN) and Local Area Network (LAN), already in place at UMDNJ.
In 1981, Shiva received a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Award, known as the “Baby Nobels” for his invention. In his Westinghouse application, the young teenager had a remarkable prescience on the future of email. He wrote in the conclusion of his application:
“One day, electronic mail, like Edison’s bulb, may also permeate and pervade our lives. It’s practical applications are unlimited. Not only is mail sent electronically, as many telexes and teletypes are capable of doing, but it offers a computational service that automates a secretary’s or file clerk’s work of writing a memorandum, document or letter, editing, filing, and retrieving. If electronic mail systems become a reality, they will surely create different patterns of communication, attitudes, and styles. Volumes of written work, for example, shall become obsolete.”
-- V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, 1981
The 14-year-old boy’s predictions on email all have come true.
Shiva’s example demonstrates that we cannot underestimate the creativity and wisdom of our young people. Nearly 25% of the world’s population is less than the age of 14, and about 50% are below the age of 25.
Excerpt from Westinghouse Science Awards Application, Shiva predicting the future of email. Click on image to download a PDF of the Shiva's Westinghouse Science Awards application.
The World Needs More "Shiva's" and "Philo's"
Jim Clifton of the Gallup Organization, in his book the Jobs War, has concluded that the world needs to create 3.2 billion new jobs within the next 10 years. The current models of innovation rely on massive amounts of capital flowing to a few centers of innovation in major cities, big companies, large universities and the military. However, according to Clifton, these current models for innovation will only create 1.4 billion new jobs.
There is a 1.8 billion new job deficit! Where will these jobs come from?
The recent uprisings across the world may likely be attributed to youth feeling distressed and having little hope for jobs and a future where they can flourish. The journey of that 14-year-old boy working in Newark, NJ reveals an inspiring and alternate model for innovation.
Such models may appear as some brilliant exception, because media simply neither highlight nor report accurately such examples, as a rule.
Philo Farnsworth, for example, conceived TV, also as a 14-year-old child, in 1930, working in his home laboratory, in the small farming town of Franklin, Idaho. Like Shiva, Philo had that same ecosystem of loving parents, a wonderful mentor, and a supportive community.
However, it took many decades for the world to even know this fact, and that too, long after he died. Vested interests, for many decades, reacted and worked hard to hide the facts of Philo being the inventor of television; and such vested interests, also reacted in a similar manner, after news of the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Shiva’s code, papers and artifacts, on February 16, 2012, documenting his invention of email.
Is it so hard for us to believe that brilliant innovations such as email and television can emerge in healthy and sustainable ecosystems beyond the bastions of big universities, large companies and the military?
Modern media has an incredible opportunity to share such facts in a timely manner based on reviewing primary sources, and moving beyond simply accepting the word of “experts”, and the propensity to copy and paste from Wikipedia. Factual reporting of other “Shiva’s” and “Philo’s” is more than just good journalism, but one that can give hope to the emerging 3.5 billion young people, below the age of 25 who deserve accurate narratives on the infinite possibilities for creativity and innovation.
We welcome you to the History of Email Series, and invite you to celebrate the Anniversary of Email, August 30th, and unleash the spirit of innovation!
About Lawrence E. Weber
Larry Weber is the Chairman & CEO of Racepoint Global (http://www.racepointglobal.com), an advanced marketing services agency, world-renowned expert in media and best-selling author. Passionate about the convergence of technology and communications, he is a frequent public speaker on the future of marketing, the social web and building communities online. Larry enjoys helping global brands and emerging companies harness social media strategies to enhance brand reputation, create and extend partnerships, and increase demand generation. He founded one of the industry's first interactive marketing agencies, Thunderhouse, and has worked with world-class clients including ARM, AT&T, Coca-Cola, Cook Medical, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Kaiser Permanente, Microsoft, and many more.
Larry serves on a number of Boards of corporations, non-profit organizations and academic institutions. He is the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX),the world's largest Internet marketing association. Larry has authored four business and marketing books, including The Provocateur: How a New Generation of Leaders Are Building Communities, Not Just Companies (Random House/Crown Business, 2002), business bestseller Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business (Wiley & Sons, 2007, with a second edition in 2009), Sticks & Stones: How Digital Business Reputations Are Created Over Time...And Lost in a Click (Wiley & Sons, 2009), and Everywhere: Comprehensive Digital Business Strategy for the Social Media Era (Wiley & Sons, 2011). Larry's newest book, The Digital Marketer: Ten New Skills You Must Learn to Stay Relevant and Customer-Centric, is due out in Spring 2014.
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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The Invention of Email
by Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D.
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
Nearly 35 years have passed since V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email in our Laboratory in 1978. Shiva was a 14-year-old student then, and today he is an accomplished inventor, scientist and entrepreneur, who has continued to innovate many things beyond email, providing thousands of jobs across the world.
In September of 2013, Shiva returned back to our Lab, still located in the same place, at 185 South Orange Avenue, Building C, Room 631 in Newark, New Jersey. It was there, in that Lab, that he conceived, designed and invented email, the email that we all experience today.
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: 14-year-old (left) and 50-year-old (right).
When Shiva visited us in September of 2013, it was to announce, along with a representative from the Office of the Mayor of Newark, that he was launching Innovation Corps, a foundation to identify, recognize, mentor and support young people, between the ages to 14-18, who wanted to innovate things, small and large, perhaps creations even bigger than email.
In 1978, we were very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Shiva. I was Shiva’s supervisor at the time. Today, we are pleased to share this Series on the History of Email to commemorate the August 30th Anniversary of Email.
I’m honored to be part of this Series, and to have the opportunity to share my experience for various reasons.
First, I hope to offer the reader a chance to hear from the proverbial “horse’s mouth” that, “Yes!” a 14-year-old boy, in 1978, did create a computer program that was the first electronic replication of the interoffice mail system (Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachments, Address Book, etc.), which he named “email’, the world’s first email system.
Email, the name of the software program he created, was more than just a simple “program” but a complete system --- it was the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the first of its kind, an integrated platform that provided all the recognizable elements of the email, we all know and use today.
My second reason for writing this article is to offer an appreciation of the ecosystem and environment, in which the invention of email took place at UMDNJ, particularly in light of the events that occurred immediately following the Smithsonian Institution’s acquisition, on February 16, 2012, of Shiva’s computer code, artifacts and papers.
A vocal minority of industry insiders, who had profited directly and indirectly from falsification of email’s history for many decades, carried on a campaign of character assassination following the Smithsonian news. They even bullied journalists and editors, who shared the facts and wrote favorably about Shiva, in order to protect their economic interests. From my observation, what really incited these individuals was that the invention of email, in Newark, NJ, was shattering false narratives on when, where and by whom, innovation could take place.
My third reason, perhaps the more important one, is to share, what I believe is, a much larger truth - that innovation, even as important as email, can occur anywhere, even by a 14-year-old boy, in Newark, New Jersey, if the right structure and resources are provided.
Let us begin by providing you a background to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and our relationship with it.
UMDNJ in 1978
In 1975 the IT department of UMDNJ, then officially known as the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, hired me, an experimental high energy physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratories, who had some general scientific computing experience and an interest in using minicomputers, the small computers of the time, to control and acquire data from laboratory experiments.
In 1978, UMDNJ, was a young organization, and prior to its establishment as a university of the Health Sciences in December of 1981, it was (and still is) a free-standing public institution comprising several medical schools, a dental school, school for the health related professions and a graduate school of the biomedical sciences. Absent were the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Rather, UMDNJ focused exclusively on clinical and basic biomedical research and healthcare. Having been signed into law in 1970 and comprised of the former Rutgers Medical School and the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, UMDNJ was establishing itself as a major academic health sciences institution.
The IT department at the time, although small, included a scientific data processing group. The group was populated with several biostatisticians and mainframe computer experts. The staff interacted with faculty from numerous departments both in the clinical and basic sciences and became quite adept at introducing machine computation to life scientists, who, given their backgrounds and given the time period had little experience in using computers. Our main local computing device, an IBM remote job entry terminal, was connected to remote batch and time sharing machines operated by an educational consortium known as the New Jersey Educational Computer Network.
Minicomputers made by Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, Hewlett Packard and others were in fairly widespread use by 1975. They were used with growing frequency in disciplines ranging from nuclear physics to neuroscience. Medical equipment manufacturers were beginning to incorporate them as control and analysis elements in a new device called CAT Scan and they would soon give rise to a new generation of diagnostic instrumentation in which the rate of data acquisition and manipulation mandated the use compact computing hardware built into or adjacent to the instrument.
UMDNJ in 1978
We were connecting minicomputers directly to laboratory equipment to automate data collection and effect control systems in which real time analysis could influence the generation of electrical stimulus thereby helping to guide the progress of neurophysiological lab experiments. Other life sciences disciplines were similarly suited to this kind of automation.
Although vastly less costly than mainframes, minicomputers were not inexpensive. Furthermore, we had several campuses on which to distribute the minicomputer resources including Newark, Piscataway and New Brunswick. These challenges led to the development of a network we called the LCN for Laboratory Computer Network, where more capable minicomputers were connected to one another and to smaller laboratory machines we called satellite nodes. The satellite nodes, more often than not, lacked a mass storage device -- they were very expensive at the time -- and depended on the larger nodes to boot their operating systems and applications.
Creating Ecosystem for Innovation
Today, there is a lot of effort underway to create innovation hubs or innovation centers. Our group at UMDNJ, far more modest in retrospect, provided an emerging ecosystem and environment for such innovation. We had the basic infrastructure, and above all were able to attract smart and dedicated people, curious and passionate, who wanted to explore new platforms. Though we ran the scientific data processing organization at UMDNJ, in a medical college in the late 1970s, it was frankly an unusual place to find the kind of experimentation that would lead to automation advances such as email that would change the way an important human-to-human communication paradigm would be mediated.
Our computer hardware infrastructure at the time comprised mainframes, minicomputers and microcomputers. The microcomputer, while an exciting and clearly promising architecture, was mainly seen in industrial controllers and as a part of larger computer components. The microcomputer had also become an obsession for many computer hobbyists. The IBM PC and subsequent wide spread adoption of desktop computing was still a few years away. Standardized networks as envisioned by the National Science Foundation’s NSFnet and its commercial successor, the Internet, were almost a decade away.
The predominant use of computers at the time was administrative business processing, scientific calculation and machine-aided design for engineering problems. However, while the role of computation in the broader context of human endeavor would lie in the distance, our hope was to explore such areas. So, we were open to finding others who wanted to participate in such exploration.
We had resources, space, a network and computing power.
Our team included the late Phil Goldstein who was an early innovator in the educational use of time-sharing systems; Robert Field, a database programmer; and Marilyn Bodow and Tina Brezenoff, statistical programmers in our group, who were looking to provide better interfaces for broader use of statistics packages. Dave Ritacco, a wunderkind studying engineering at the Stevens Technical Institute, also began working with us to develop user interfaces for graphics systems, predecessor to modern day presentation graphics.
It was in this environment that we met Shiva.
The Creation of Email
In 1978, a colleague, Martin Feuerman, from our parent IT organization approached us to ask if we would spend some time with Shiva, a 14-year-old high school student from Livingston New Jersey. Meenakshi Ayyadurai, Shiva’s mother, told me that her son had just completed a special program in computer programming at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU) for young persons who had demonstrated significant promise in mathematics. Our willingness to talk to Shiva, unfolded into an exciting diversion from the major focus of our work.
Leslie P. Michelson (left) and V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai (right).
By the time Shiva joined the LCN as a high school Research Scholar, a few of us were beginning to ponder the role minicomputers might play in the larger space of human interaction. We were obviously familiar with the nature of the simple interactivity between humans and machines -- after all, much of the software we developed to manage lab experiments required interactivity if an investigator was to be in the loop of experimental input and resultant response. We were also familiar with the methods and protocols by which computers could exchange messages with other similar types of computers. Our minicomputers, manufactured by the Hewlett Packard Corporation, were provisioned with subsystems that supported this type of communication. Human interaction was mediated through teletypewriters and relatively primitive CRT-based display devices.
The age-honored interoffice memorandum, the “memo”, the primary modality of written human-human communication in the workplace was widely used at UMDNJ as it was everywhere else. The memo, regardless of the method of transport and retrieval has the general properties of one-to-one or one-to-many distribution and is easily filed to keep a record of a particular human discourse. In 1978, as in decades earlier, the memorandum was delivered by hand or in the case of a campus or group of campuses, placed in a mailer and transported by an interoffice/ inter-organizational/ campus/ intercampus paper mail process, that including pneumatic tubes.
It did not take long to recognize that Shiva was an exceptional student and to determine that we could challenge him in extraordinary ways. Although beyond the scope of our responsibility, we were eager to explore the use of small computers outside of the space of numerical calculation and experiment control. The notion of automating the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail process to create a system was appealing for several reasons: It was a ubiquitous process, the mechanics of which, at least superficially, could be understood by anyone; the advantage of automation was obvious in that it would be possible to significantly collapse the time frame of transactions; and there were multiple ways in which electronic automation could extend the utility of the memorandum.
As far as we knew, no one else in 1978 had attempted to take on such a task.
In fact, recently, we discovered historical documents, including the famous RAND report written by David Crocker, which clearly stated that ARPANET researchers thought it “impossible” and did not even “attempt” to take on such a task. In the December 1977, RAND report, Mr. Crocker stated:
The reader should be aware, that after the Smithsonian’s acceptance, on February of 2012, of Shiva’s papers documenting his invention at UMDNJ, it was Mr. Crocker, who led a vitriolic campaign across the Internet to brush aside and diminish the invention of email by Shiva at UMDNJ. For decades, Mr. Crocker and his ARPANET fraternity had conflated their contributions to email by crediting themselves as “inventors of email” by misusing the term “email” to refer to their work in Text Messaging as “email”. As the historical RAND report clearly shows, neither Mr. Crocker nor his colleagues at the ARPANET, per his own admission, had any intention to create email, the inter-organizational mail system.
When Mr. Crocker’s RAND Report was found by MIT student researcher Devon Sparks, and released within the False Claims section on the web site http://www.inventorofemail.com, organized and edited by Dr. Deborah Nightingale and Dr. Sen Song, in 2012, Mr. Crocker, who I had no relationship with, contacted me and requested to meet me behind closed doors, likely to perform damage control as his contradictory behavior was being exposed.
I declined Mr. Crocker’s request.
The damage he and his ARPANET fraternity had done by being accomplices to the defamatory journalism, unleashed on Shiva, was beyond inexcusable. We hope that on the Anniversary of Email, Mr. Crocker reads his December 1977 RAND Report, and issues a public apology to Shiva, if he desires an authentic intellectual exchange with Shiva and me.
So, for us in 1978, the creation of an electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail process became the object of our affection. This was a different perspective than Mr. Crocker and the ARPANET researchers, who chose not to attempt to emulate a full-scale inter-organizational mail system, and had deemed the creation of such a system impossible.
We were confident that Shiva could do it.
We sat Shiva down and offered him what turned out to be one of most innovative (and fun) projects our group was ever to undertake. In return, we demanded that this 14-year-old youngster channel all of his energies into the project. We made it very clear that he would be a full-fledged member of our team, treated as an adult and that we would expect nothing less from him. Livingston High School agreed to Shiva spending initially a few days a week and later to half-days at the Newark, New Jersey Campus.
Shiva was eager to begin writing code -- after all that was the most fun. It was surprisingly easy, though, to convince Shiva that the code would just be a physical embodiment of the design. Although, we would need a working version, indeed a production model, the lasting contribution would be the systems analysis that we hoped would lead to implementation that was more than the mere automation of a manual process. We wanted to develop a sustainable logical and functional framework that would add significant value and lead to further innovation over time.
Shiva’s first task was to learn how the interoffice memorandum was used at the University. Who wrote them and to whom? What was their place in the hierarchy of written documentation? What was the sender’s expectation of a reply? What volume could we anticipate? And, of course, what could we do to improve the utility of this modality? Surely, user would want more features as soon as they recognized this new potential. Could we be one step ahead?
Thus, after long deliberations, always with Shiva in the lead, we arrived at core design principles, which in the context of the day, were original, and forward looking at the very least:
• A simple user interface would require no specific computer knowledge and would provide access to all program features at the user level. Command lines are to be prohibited --- our users were life science researchers, clinicians and administrators, not computer scientists.
• The user interface would include a visual compose mode with spelling and formatting capability.
• Interoffice memos would be stored in a structure database and replicated on each node, which would also manage account and routing information.
• Only one instance of a message would exist on any one node until the last recipient elected to delete it or save it in another location.
• Each instance of the program would operate independently of the status of other nodes or the University’s local- and wide-area networks (such as they existed at the time).
• Delivery would be guaranteed.
• Attributes, considered to be part of a letter-based postal delivery system, such as return receipt requested would be implemented.
• A full management interface with account maintenance, environment status and debugging tools would be developed.
• The electronic metaphor of all the other elements of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system would need to be incorporated: inbox, outbox, folders, memo structure, address book and other important features, that we now have in modern email systems.
Our software tools were relatively primitive. A FORTRAN IV compiler with restrictive variable naming conventions and lacking intrinsic file system access; a non-relational, hierarchical database management system; and a simple networking environment that permitted static routing among nodes in a predetermined mesh. These tools ran on the HP1000 platform, a real-time environment not particularly optimal for the kind of development we envisioned.
Innovation Anywhere, Anytime by Anyone
These impediments turned out to be of little consequence, but certainly upped the complexity of the programmer’s task and by some measure, Shiva’s accomplishment. In fact, the inflexibility of the development and execution environment turned out to be somewhat serendipitous.
First page of the computer program showing Shiva’s naming the program “email”, thus defining email to be the electronic interoffice mail system.
Our project combined the attributes of both the interoffice memorandum and paper mail systems. The FORTRAN IV compiler limited variable names to six characters. Moreover, the RTE/IVB operating system running on our HP1000 computers limited process names to five characters.
Did I hear EMAIL?
Of course! Our new service was electronic and it combined many if not all of the characteristics of paper mail. I can attest that Shiva was the sole author of the entire EMAIL program and system. We released the first version in late 1978. The next year in 1979, he was paid $1.25 per hour and promoted to Research Fellow, and we continued to release new versions of email.
A few years later, Shiva, obtained a Copyright for the program. Nearly 500 users used the system. The rest should be history.
Official US Copyright Notice for “Email” Issued on August 30, 1982, now, in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (NMAH).
Shiva had written some 50,000 lines of FORTRAN code across more than a dozen cooperating processes that communicated within a node and across the Laboratory Computer Network. In those days, the total amount of memory to run the program on the computer was less than 64 Kilobytes! Shiva had to find clever ways to unload and load those processes, in a seamless manner. This was not easy, and required a great deal creativity, persistence and determination.
We recall that on formal launch day, we filled a large lecture hall at the New Jersey Medical School with technical staff and other parties that were fascinated by the work Shiva had done. Here we were, all of these people: IT professionals, administrators, family and friends to learn what Shiva had done. Multiple screens and white boards filled with charts, “screen shots” and flow diagrams kept everyone‘s attention. There was a bizarre aspect that pervaded all of this.
The presenter was not a distinguished scientist or clinician from UMDNJ or some other vaunted institution, but rather a very young man, a teenager, with a fascinating story of ingenuity and determination.
There is much credit to spread around the vast community of academic, industrial and military researchers and engineers who eclipsed the industrial revolution with their contributions to computer science and computer and network engineering.
We take no credit where it is not due.
We will, however, stand firmly for the innovation that took place at a health sciences institution, an unlikely venue for the work we did. Our incentive was not fame nor fortune, but rather a challenge that arose from our own experiences and our desire to take on a challenge and place our faith on the resources of a 14-year-old student from Livingston, New Jersey, who was disciplined and found a way to come to Newark, NJ to work.
There is a larger story here, one that should be evident by now.
Innovation can happen anywhere, anytime by anyone. The sooner we embrace this truth, the sooner our lives will be enriched by the thousands of other “Shivas” that do not have the luxury of working in the established bastions of innovation, but nevertheless have the intellect and drive to make big contributions.
About Leslie P. Michelson
Leslie P. MichelsonLeslie P. Michelson, Ph.D. is the Director of High Performance and Research Computing Division, Rutgers Medical School (RMS). In 1975, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), now a part of RMS, recruited Dr. Michelson, a trained theoretical physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratories. His group at RMS develops solutions in the life sciences for research endeavors with demanding computational requirements. In the late 1970’s Michelson’s organization provided the challenge, resources and mentorship that led to the development of the first electronic interoffice memorandum postal system by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. Throughout his career Michelson has been active in the support of the use of networking technologies to advance research and education interests in the State of New Jersey. He was a founder and served as the third president of the New Jersey Intercampus Network, the predecessor of the State’s Higher Education and Research Network, NJEDge.Net.
by Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D.
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Nearly 35 years have passed since V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email in our Laboratory in 1978. Shiva was a 14-year-old student then, and today he is an accomplished inventor, scientist and entrepreneur, who has continued to innovate many things beyond email, providing thousands of jobs across the world.
In September of 2013, Shiva returned back to our Lab, still located in the same place, at 185 South Orange Avenue, Building C, Room 631 in Newark, New Jersey. It was there, in that Lab, that he conceived, designed and invented email, the email that we all experience today.
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: 14-year-old (left) and 50-year-old (right).
When Shiva visited us in September of 2013, it was to announce, along with a representative from the Office of the Mayor of Newark, that he was launching Innovation Corps, a foundation to identify, recognize, mentor and support young people, between the ages to 14-18, who wanted to innovate things, small and large, perhaps creations even bigger than email.
In 1978, we were very fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with Shiva. I was Shiva’s supervisor at the time. Today, we are pleased to share this Series on the History of Email to commemorate the August 30th Anniversary of Email.
I’m honored to be part of this Series, and to have the opportunity to share my experience for various reasons.
First, I hope to offer the reader a chance to hear from the proverbial “horse’s mouth” that, “Yes!” a 14-year-old boy, in 1978, did create a computer program that was the first electronic replication of the interoffice mail system (Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachments, Address Book, etc.), which he named “email’, the world’s first email system.
Email, the name of the software program he created, was more than just a simple “program” but a complete system --- it was the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the first of its kind, an integrated platform that provided all the recognizable elements of the email, we all know and use today.
My second reason for writing this article is to offer an appreciation of the ecosystem and environment, in which the invention of email took place at UMDNJ, particularly in light of the events that occurred immediately following the Smithsonian Institution’s acquisition, on February 16, 2012, of Shiva’s computer code, artifacts and papers.
A vocal minority of industry insiders, who had profited directly and indirectly from falsification of email’s history for many decades, carried on a campaign of character assassination following the Smithsonian news. They even bullied journalists and editors, who shared the facts and wrote favorably about Shiva, in order to protect their economic interests. From my observation, what really incited these individuals was that the invention of email, in Newark, NJ, was shattering false narratives on when, where and by whom, innovation could take place.
My third reason, perhaps the more important one, is to share, what I believe is, a much larger truth - that innovation, even as important as email, can occur anywhere, even by a 14-year-old boy, in Newark, New Jersey, if the right structure and resources are provided.
Let us begin by providing you a background to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) and our relationship with it.
UMDNJ in 1978
In 1975 the IT department of UMDNJ, then officially known as the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, hired me, an experimental high energy physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratories, who had some general scientific computing experience and an interest in using minicomputers, the small computers of the time, to control and acquire data from laboratory experiments.
In 1978, UMDNJ, was a young organization, and prior to its establishment as a university of the Health Sciences in December of 1981, it was (and still is) a free-standing public institution comprising several medical schools, a dental school, school for the health related professions and a graduate school of the biomedical sciences. Absent were the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Rather, UMDNJ focused exclusively on clinical and basic biomedical research and healthcare. Having been signed into law in 1970 and comprised of the former Rutgers Medical School and the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, UMDNJ was establishing itself as a major academic health sciences institution.
The IT department at the time, although small, included a scientific data processing group. The group was populated with several biostatisticians and mainframe computer experts. The staff interacted with faculty from numerous departments both in the clinical and basic sciences and became quite adept at introducing machine computation to life scientists, who, given their backgrounds and given the time period had little experience in using computers. Our main local computing device, an IBM remote job entry terminal, was connected to remote batch and time sharing machines operated by an educational consortium known as the New Jersey Educational Computer Network.
Minicomputers made by Digital Equipment Corporation, Data General, Hewlett Packard and others were in fairly widespread use by 1975. They were used with growing frequency in disciplines ranging from nuclear physics to neuroscience. Medical equipment manufacturers were beginning to incorporate them as control and analysis elements in a new device called CAT Scan and they would soon give rise to a new generation of diagnostic instrumentation in which the rate of data acquisition and manipulation mandated the use compact computing hardware built into or adjacent to the instrument.
UMDNJ in 1978
We were connecting minicomputers directly to laboratory equipment to automate data collection and effect control systems in which real time analysis could influence the generation of electrical stimulus thereby helping to guide the progress of neurophysiological lab experiments. Other life sciences disciplines were similarly suited to this kind of automation.
Although vastly less costly than mainframes, minicomputers were not inexpensive. Furthermore, we had several campuses on which to distribute the minicomputer resources including Newark, Piscataway and New Brunswick. These challenges led to the development of a network we called the LCN for Laboratory Computer Network, where more capable minicomputers were connected to one another and to smaller laboratory machines we called satellite nodes. The satellite nodes, more often than not, lacked a mass storage device -- they were very expensive at the time -- and depended on the larger nodes to boot their operating systems and applications.
Creating Ecosystem for Innovation
Today, there is a lot of effort underway to create innovation hubs or innovation centers. Our group at UMDNJ, far more modest in retrospect, provided an emerging ecosystem and environment for such innovation. We had the basic infrastructure, and above all were able to attract smart and dedicated people, curious and passionate, who wanted to explore new platforms. Though we ran the scientific data processing organization at UMDNJ, in a medical college in the late 1970s, it was frankly an unusual place to find the kind of experimentation that would lead to automation advances such as email that would change the way an important human-to-human communication paradigm would be mediated.
Our computer hardware infrastructure at the time comprised mainframes, minicomputers and microcomputers. The microcomputer, while an exciting and clearly promising architecture, was mainly seen in industrial controllers and as a part of larger computer components. The microcomputer had also become an obsession for many computer hobbyists. The IBM PC and subsequent wide spread adoption of desktop computing was still a few years away. Standardized networks as envisioned by the National Science Foundation’s NSFnet and its commercial successor, the Internet, were almost a decade away.
The predominant use of computers at the time was administrative business processing, scientific calculation and machine-aided design for engineering problems. However, while the role of computation in the broader context of human endeavor would lie in the distance, our hope was to explore such areas. So, we were open to finding others who wanted to participate in such exploration.
We had resources, space, a network and computing power.
Our team included the late Phil Goldstein who was an early innovator in the educational use of time-sharing systems; Robert Field, a database programmer; and Marilyn Bodow and Tina Brezenoff, statistical programmers in our group, who were looking to provide better interfaces for broader use of statistics packages. Dave Ritacco, a wunderkind studying engineering at the Stevens Technical Institute, also began working with us to develop user interfaces for graphics systems, predecessor to modern day presentation graphics.
It was in this environment that we met Shiva.
The Creation of Email
In 1978, a colleague, Martin Feuerman, from our parent IT organization approached us to ask if we would spend some time with Shiva, a 14-year-old high school student from Livingston New Jersey. Meenakshi Ayyadurai, Shiva’s mother, told me that her son had just completed a special program in computer programming at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University (NYU) for young persons who had demonstrated significant promise in mathematics. Our willingness to talk to Shiva, unfolded into an exciting diversion from the major focus of our work.
Leslie P. Michelson (left) and V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai (right).
By the time Shiva joined the LCN as a high school Research Scholar, a few of us were beginning to ponder the role minicomputers might play in the larger space of human interaction. We were obviously familiar with the nature of the simple interactivity between humans and machines -- after all, much of the software we developed to manage lab experiments required interactivity if an investigator was to be in the loop of experimental input and resultant response. We were also familiar with the methods and protocols by which computers could exchange messages with other similar types of computers. Our minicomputers, manufactured by the Hewlett Packard Corporation, were provisioned with subsystems that supported this type of communication. Human interaction was mediated through teletypewriters and relatively primitive CRT-based display devices.
The age-honored interoffice memorandum, the “memo”, the primary modality of written human-human communication in the workplace was widely used at UMDNJ as it was everywhere else. The memo, regardless of the method of transport and retrieval has the general properties of one-to-one or one-to-many distribution and is easily filed to keep a record of a particular human discourse. In 1978, as in decades earlier, the memorandum was delivered by hand or in the case of a campus or group of campuses, placed in a mailer and transported by an interoffice/ inter-organizational/ campus/ intercampus paper mail process, that including pneumatic tubes.
It did not take long to recognize that Shiva was an exceptional student and to determine that we could challenge him in extraordinary ways. Although beyond the scope of our responsibility, we were eager to explore the use of small computers outside of the space of numerical calculation and experiment control. The notion of automating the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail process to create a system was appealing for several reasons: It was a ubiquitous process, the mechanics of which, at least superficially, could be understood by anyone; the advantage of automation was obvious in that it would be possible to significantly collapse the time frame of transactions; and there were multiple ways in which electronic automation could extend the utility of the memorandum.
As far as we knew, no one else in 1978 had attempted to take on such a task.
In fact, recently, we discovered historical documents, including the famous RAND report written by David Crocker, which clearly stated that ARPANET researchers thought it “impossible” and did not even “attempt” to take on such a task. In the December 1977, RAND report, Mr. Crocker stated:
"At this time, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system [p.4]…. The fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users' needs. [p.7]”
— Crocker, David. Framework and Function of the "MS" Personal Message System. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1977.
Since the system is to be used for communication which is exemplified in older and heavily-exercised technology, it is assumed that users have an extensive conceptual model of the communication domain. It is further assumed that a system which performs in ways which deviate from that model will be viewed as "idiosyncratic" and impeding the efforts of the user. Problems occurring during this sort of interaction can be expected to be as irritating as having a pen which leaks or a typewriter with keys that jam. Therefore, a major design goal for MS is to provide an integrated set of necessary and sufficient functions which conform to the target user's cognitive model of a regular office-memo system. At this stage, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale inter-organization mail system....
The level of the MS project effort has also had a major effect upon the system's design. To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible with MS. In addition, the fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to users' needs. Consequently, important segments of a full message environment have received little or no attention and decisions have been made with the expectation that other Unix capabilities will be used to augment MS. For example, MS has fairly primitive data-base management (i.e., filing and cataloging) facilities and message folders have been implemented in a way which allows them to be modified by programs, such as text editors, which access them directly, rather than through the message system.
-- Framework and Functions of the "MS" Personal Message System: A Report prepared for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, by David H. Crocker
The reader should be aware, that after the Smithsonian’s acceptance, on February of 2012, of Shiva’s papers documenting his invention at UMDNJ, it was Mr. Crocker, who led a vitriolic campaign across the Internet to brush aside and diminish the invention of email by Shiva at UMDNJ. For decades, Mr. Crocker and his ARPANET fraternity had conflated their contributions to email by crediting themselves as “inventors of email” by misusing the term “email” to refer to their work in Text Messaging as “email”. As the historical RAND report clearly shows, neither Mr. Crocker nor his colleagues at the ARPANET, per his own admission, had any intention to create email, the inter-organizational mail system.
When Mr. Crocker’s RAND Report was found by MIT student researcher Devon Sparks, and released within the False Claims section on the web site http://www.inventorofemail.com, organized and edited by Dr. Deborah Nightingale and Dr. Sen Song, in 2012, Mr. Crocker, who I had no relationship with, contacted me and requested to meet me behind closed doors, likely to perform damage control as his contradictory behavior was being exposed.
I declined Mr. Crocker’s request.
The damage he and his ARPANET fraternity had done by being accomplices to the defamatory journalism, unleashed on Shiva, was beyond inexcusable. We hope that on the Anniversary of Email, Mr. Crocker reads his December 1977 RAND Report, and issues a public apology to Shiva, if he desires an authentic intellectual exchange with Shiva and me.
So, for us in 1978, the creation of an electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail process became the object of our affection. This was a different perspective than Mr. Crocker and the ARPANET researchers, who chose not to attempt to emulate a full-scale inter-organizational mail system, and had deemed the creation of such a system impossible.
We were confident that Shiva could do it.
We sat Shiva down and offered him what turned out to be one of most innovative (and fun) projects our group was ever to undertake. In return, we demanded that this 14-year-old youngster channel all of his energies into the project. We made it very clear that he would be a full-fledged member of our team, treated as an adult and that we would expect nothing less from him. Livingston High School agreed to Shiva spending initially a few days a week and later to half-days at the Newark, New Jersey Campus.
Shiva was eager to begin writing code -- after all that was the most fun. It was surprisingly easy, though, to convince Shiva that the code would just be a physical embodiment of the design. Although, we would need a working version, indeed a production model, the lasting contribution would be the systems analysis that we hoped would lead to implementation that was more than the mere automation of a manual process. We wanted to develop a sustainable logical and functional framework that would add significant value and lead to further innovation over time.
Shiva’s first task was to learn how the interoffice memorandum was used at the University. Who wrote them and to whom? What was their place in the hierarchy of written documentation? What was the sender’s expectation of a reply? What volume could we anticipate? And, of course, what could we do to improve the utility of this modality? Surely, user would want more features as soon as they recognized this new potential. Could we be one step ahead?
Thus, after long deliberations, always with Shiva in the lead, we arrived at core design principles, which in the context of the day, were original, and forward looking at the very least:
• A simple user interface would require no specific computer knowledge and would provide access to all program features at the user level. Command lines are to be prohibited --- our users were life science researchers, clinicians and administrators, not computer scientists.
• The user interface would include a visual compose mode with spelling and formatting capability.
• Interoffice memos would be stored in a structure database and replicated on each node, which would also manage account and routing information.
• Only one instance of a message would exist on any one node until the last recipient elected to delete it or save it in another location.
• Each instance of the program would operate independently of the status of other nodes or the University’s local- and wide-area networks (such as they existed at the time).
• Delivery would be guaranteed.
• Attributes, considered to be part of a letter-based postal delivery system, such as return receipt requested would be implemented.
• A full management interface with account maintenance, environment status and debugging tools would be developed.
• The electronic metaphor of all the other elements of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system would need to be incorporated: inbox, outbox, folders, memo structure, address book and other important features, that we now have in modern email systems.
Our software tools were relatively primitive. A FORTRAN IV compiler with restrictive variable naming conventions and lacking intrinsic file system access; a non-relational, hierarchical database management system; and a simple networking environment that permitted static routing among nodes in a predetermined mesh. These tools ran on the HP1000 platform, a real-time environment not particularly optimal for the kind of development we envisioned.
Innovation Anywhere, Anytime by Anyone
These impediments turned out to be of little consequence, but certainly upped the complexity of the programmer’s task and by some measure, Shiva’s accomplishment. In fact, the inflexibility of the development and execution environment turned out to be somewhat serendipitous.
First page of the computer program showing Shiva’s naming the program “email”, thus defining email to be the electronic interoffice mail system.
Our project combined the attributes of both the interoffice memorandum and paper mail systems. The FORTRAN IV compiler limited variable names to six characters. Moreover, the RTE/IVB operating system running on our HP1000 computers limited process names to five characters.
Did I hear EMAIL?
Of course! Our new service was electronic and it combined many if not all of the characteristics of paper mail. I can attest that Shiva was the sole author of the entire EMAIL program and system. We released the first version in late 1978. The next year in 1979, he was paid $1.25 per hour and promoted to Research Fellow, and we continued to release new versions of email.
A few years later, Shiva, obtained a Copyright for the program. Nearly 500 users used the system. The rest should be history.
Official US Copyright Notice for “Email” Issued on August 30, 1982, now, in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (NMAH).
Shiva had written some 50,000 lines of FORTRAN code across more than a dozen cooperating processes that communicated within a node and across the Laboratory Computer Network. In those days, the total amount of memory to run the program on the computer was less than 64 Kilobytes! Shiva had to find clever ways to unload and load those processes, in a seamless manner. This was not easy, and required a great deal creativity, persistence and determination.
We recall that on formal launch day, we filled a large lecture hall at the New Jersey Medical School with technical staff and other parties that were fascinated by the work Shiva had done. Here we were, all of these people: IT professionals, administrators, family and friends to learn what Shiva had done. Multiple screens and white boards filled with charts, “screen shots” and flow diagrams kept everyone‘s attention. There was a bizarre aspect that pervaded all of this.
The presenter was not a distinguished scientist or clinician from UMDNJ or some other vaunted institution, but rather a very young man, a teenager, with a fascinating story of ingenuity and determination.
There is much credit to spread around the vast community of academic, industrial and military researchers and engineers who eclipsed the industrial revolution with their contributions to computer science and computer and network engineering.
We take no credit where it is not due.
We will, however, stand firmly for the innovation that took place at a health sciences institution, an unlikely venue for the work we did. Our incentive was not fame nor fortune, but rather a challenge that arose from our own experiences and our desire to take on a challenge and place our faith on the resources of a 14-year-old student from Livingston, New Jersey, who was disciplined and found a way to come to Newark, NJ to work.
There is a larger story here, one that should be evident by now.
Innovation can happen anywhere, anytime by anyone. The sooner we embrace this truth, the sooner our lives will be enriched by the thousands of other “Shivas” that do not have the luxury of working in the established bastions of innovation, but nevertheless have the intellect and drive to make big contributions.
About Leslie P. Michelson
Leslie P. MichelsonLeslie P. Michelson, Ph.D. is the Director of High Performance and Research Computing Division, Rutgers Medical School (RMS). In 1975, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), now a part of RMS, recruited Dr. Michelson, a trained theoretical physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratories. His group at RMS develops solutions in the life sciences for research endeavors with demanding computational requirements. In the late 1970’s Michelson’s organization provided the challenge, resources and mentorship that led to the development of the first electronic interoffice memorandum postal system by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. Throughout his career Michelson has been active in the support of the use of networking technologies to advance research and education interests in the State of New Jersey. He was a founder and served as the third president of the New Jersey Intercampus Network, the predecessor of the State’s Higher Education and Research Network, NJEDge.Net.
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The First Email System
by Robert Field
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
The Third Article in The History of Email Series
What we know today as “email” is really a system - a system of interlocking parts, each of which is essential for ordinary people to communicate effectively with one or many others, in an environment where different kinds of information must be shared (memos, documents, files, etc.) i.e. the modern office environment.
In 1978, I was a colleague of Shiva Ayyadurai’s at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, NJ. Shiva and I worked together in the modern office environment of the 1970s, where information sharing, primarily through the printed-paper medium, was the modus operandi.
First page of the computer program showing Shiva’s naming the program “email”, thus defining email to be the electronic interoffice mail system.
Much of my effort at the time was dedicated to managing database software systems. Though Shiva was nearly 20 years younger than me, neither I nor the other Lab members thought of Shiva as a kid or a student. His professionalism, programming capabilities, attention to detail, and commitment to producing software that was user-friendly and reliable, was extraordinary.
His supervisor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson challenged Shiva to create an electronic system that would emulate the interoffice mail system, then in use at UMDNJ. My interaction was one of being a sounding board for Shiva, time-to-time, on database functions and operating systems issues such as memory management. I recall, in particular, Shiva’s incredible persistence to face a technical problem head on, and to solve it.
As a former colleague of Shiva’s, I hope my writing this article, as a part of this History of Email Series, provides details on the first email system created at UMDNJ in 1978.
The Interoffice Mail System
Many people over the age of 40, myself included, will remember the interoffice paper mail system, which was the basis of how offices around the world operated, from the level of secretaries to CEOs. The interoffice mail system had the following interlocked parts (as detailed in Table 1 below), which are the now-familiar components of email: Inbox, the Memo (“To:”, “From:”, “Date:”, “Subject:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”), Forwarding, Composing, Drafts, Edit, Reply, Delete, Priorities, Outbox, Folders, Archive, Attachments, Return Receipt, Carbon Copies (including Blind Carbon Copies), Sorting, Address Book, Groups, Bulk Distribution.
The interoffice mail system was not only used across offices but also inter-departmentally and inter-organizationally, some referring to it also as the inter-departmental or inter-organizational mail system, respectively. In this article, we consistently refer to the mail system as the interoffice mail system.
The interoffice mail system at UMDNJ was complicated, consisting of many components. In Table 1, below, is a detailed listing of the parts of the interoffice paper mail system, in use at UMDNJ in 1978, along with their detailed descriptions. If you took away any one component or part, such as the ability to attach other materials (Attachments) or the use of Folders or the ability to send Carbon Copies, your ability to function and communicate with co-workers was greatly impaired in the office environment. This is why it was a “system”, because you needed all the components to work together.
If you did not know what the interoffice mail system was, before reading this article, I hope Table 1 was educational and provided you a detailed understanding of this paper-based system. Moreover, you will observe a near 1-to-1 correspondence with the parts of the interoffice mail system, itemized in Table 1, and the email system you are using today.
Email As We Know It Was Invented at UMDNJ
In 1978, Shiva conceived and developed an electronic system that replicated all the functions of UMDNJ’s entire interoffice paper mail system, as itemized in Table 1 above.
He named the system “email”, a name that, based on extensive document review, was first introduced and brought into use as his system spread throughout the UMDNJ campuses. This name was assigned to his program for both convenience and out of necessity since the FORTRAN IV programming language, which “email” was written in, required all variables to be in upper case and the RTE-IV operating system had a five-character limit for program names - thus, Shiva concatenated the letters “E”, ”M”, ”A”, ”I”, ”L” to name his program.
In 1978, those five juxtaposed characters had never been used before in the modern English language. While this term may seem obvious to us today, in 1978, it was not.
Table 2 provides a list of all the features that Shiva implemented into the first email system. As you can see, this system was not a “simple” system for just exchanging text messages. It was a full-scale version of the interoffice mail system in an electronic format.
This was email.
Email was delivered as one holistic platform, that integrated an easy-to-use interface, and a word processor, all built from scratch by Shiva, as well as a relational database (to support folders, archival, sorting and many other features not possible with flat-file based approaches), with a modular intercommunications protocol.
In 1978, UMDNJ had four campus locations in New Jersey: Newark, Piscataway, Camden, and New Brunswick. Shiva and I worked out of the Newark campus. Workers on these campuses began using email as a public and commercially viable system starting in 1978, when we released the first version. At that time, any one who used a computer on the network, had to login. They were billed for hours of usage for the applications they chose to use. Email was one of these applications.
Shiva solely built the entire system, nearly 50,000 lines of code, using a high-level programming language (FORTRAN IV) and HP IMAGE/1000 database system. He was the sole author of this email system, designing and writing all the code. Dr. Leslie P. Michelson’s article “The Invention of Email”, which is also part of this series, provides additional details from Dr. Michelson’s interactions with Shiva at UMDNJ.
Unlike the developments on the ARPAnet, email was built to address a systems problem in the ordinary office situation using local area and wide area networks (LANs and WANs), where computers across offices and multiple campuses were connected --- independent of the ARPAnet. None of us in the Lab at UMDNJ had any contact with the ARPAnet. The first email system was meant to be a widely shared system of ongoing communication by ordinary workers, not computer scientists who knew code.
Email was developed with a focus on user-friendliness and high-reliability, and deployed as a commercial product, where nearly 500 office workers accessed, and used it. In 1981, Shiva was awarded a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Award for inventing email.
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai received Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Award for invention of email system
Since patenting of software was not available in 1978, Shiva had to wait until 1980, when it became possible to protect software inventions by Copyright. In 1981, he applied for protection of his software, and was awarded two US copyrights in 1982.
Official US Copyright Notice for “Email” Issued on August 30, 1982, now in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (NMAH).
One Copyright was for “Email”, “Computer Program for Electronic Mail System”, and the other Copyright was for the User’s Manual. He wrote the User’s Manual with the idea that anybody in an office setting could learn and adapt to his system. He had customers to serve!
Email Is Not Simply An Exchange of Messages
So email as a system is not simply exchanging messages among computers, even if a person at one end types a message to a human recipient. Sending text messages alone is what today we call Texting, SMS, Chat or Twitter.
Standard histories of the Internet are full of claims that certain individuals (and teams) in the ARPAnet environment in the 1970s and 1980s “invented email.” For example, the “@” sign, early programs for sending and receiving messages, and technical specifications known as RFCs, have been claimed to be “email.” But as some claimants have admitted, none of these innovations were intended as a system of interlocking parts Inbox, Memo, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, etc. the email system used today by billions of people worldwide.
The standard histories have used the term “email” - which today is understood to be a system of interdependent features - to apply to other forms of electronic communication. Those developments aimed to solve various problems, but were not intended to substitute for the interoffice paper mail system.
These claims have been compiled in an article called the “The Five Myths About Email” by Dr. Deborah J. Nightingale, an eminent enterprise systems architect and former Director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. This article is a summary of her and Dr. Sen Song's original work posted as False Claims on http://www.inventorofemail.com. Research across hundreds of primary sources concerning these claims shows that each of these innovations - while very important in the evolution of the Internet - were single functions and never a system of interlocked components intended to emulate the interoffice paper mail system.
Conclusion
Members of our Lab kept in touch with Shiva. His work with email continued over the past thirty-five years, even after he left our Lab. From 1978 to 1984, he continued to enhance and evolve his invention at UMDNJ. In 1993, he went on to invent EchoMail, a platform for intelligent email management, growing out of work with the US White House.
During 1993 to 2003, EchoMail became one of the leading email management and email marketing companies for Global 2000 organizations. In early 2000, Shiva began the Email Research Institute, which is now known as the Email Lab, a division of the International Center for Integrative Systems, and aims to provide fundamental research about email. EchoMail, as I understand, now makes its technology accessible to small and mid-sized businesses. Today, he serves as Director of the Email Lab as well as a Board member of EchoMail, Inc.
As to his 1978 invention, on February 16, 2012, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC held a donation ceremony to accept the 50,000 lines of computer code, tapes, papers and other artifacts documenting the invention of email at UMDNJ. All of us, who were colleagues of Shiva, were proud of this event and happy that he received this well-deserved recognition.
An article about the donation ceremony in the Washington Post led to a series of counterclaims, and personal attacks on him. These events inspired those who had worked with Shiva in 1978 as well as some of his other colleagues to develop the website http://www.inventorofemail.com to share the facts about email’s invention.
As the website documents, industry insiders, loyal to Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar defense company, had created their entire brand, bearing the ‘@’ logo, based on claims of having “invented email”. This group unleashed a vicious public relations campaign. This campaign aimed to discredit email’s origins, intimidate journalists who did not parrot their claims, and assassinate Shiva’s character, while defending and promoting Raytheon/BBN’s brand as the “inventor of email” in the lucrative and competitive cyber-security market.
The leaders of these attacks included David Crocker, a member of the ARPAnet research community starting in 1972, and “historians” and “experts”, either former or current employees of Raytheon/BBN or close associates.
Mr. Crocker, during his attacks, however, had omitted an important fact, to the press and media. In December of 1977, months before Shiva invented email in 1978, Mr. Crocker had authored a historical document for the eminent RAND Corporation, where he summarized the history of electronic messaging by his colleagues, up until December of 1977. In that document, Mr. Crocker had stated:
From the beginning of his joining our research group, Shiva, however, had a singular intention to emulate the full-scale version of the interoffice paper mail system, with the precise goal of addressing the “various organizational contexts”, with “users of differing expertise” such as secretaries, doctors and students at UMDNJ, unlike the ARPAnet researchers.
He did “attempt” and did do the “impossible” to respond to “all users’ needs” by inventing email - the system of interlocking parts replicating the interoffice mail system - the email we all experience today, which Mr. Crocker and his contemporaries had concluded was “impossible”.
In spite of the overwhelming facts of email’s invention by Shiva in 1978 at UMDNJ, detractors and “historians”, part of the ARPAnet community as well as supporters of Raytheon/BBN, unleashed a campaign of historical revisionism in journals and other media to attempt to redefine “email” and to state that no one could have “invented email”. Their attempts at such historical revisionism are also documented on http://www.inventorofemail.com.
In filing for the Copyright, the United States Copyright Office made Shiva’s work products, such as the User’s Manual and portions of his code, publicly available; anyone in the world could have access to it. Shortly after his invention, from 1982 onwards, other products with the same functions and interlocked components used in Shiva’s program “email” appeared in rapid succession (see the History of Email Infographic).
Shiva’s distinction as inventor of email is not to suggest that someone else, at some point in history, would not have created a full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system (and perhaps called it something else), independent of his invention. The advances in computing and networking, and a growing desire to automate paper-based functions, would have eventually led to the creation of such a system. However, Shiva was the first to create such a system, to call it “email”, and, the first, to receive formal recognition by the United States Government for its invention.
This article, I hope, clarifies what “email” is and what it is not, as well as Shiva’s role as the inventor of email in 1978, while at UMDNJ, and finally, his commitment throughout his career to evolving email to benefit the general public.
About Robert Field
Robert Field is a Senior IST Technologist at Rutgers Medical School (RMS) in the school of Biomedical Sciences. For nearly 40 years, Mr. Field has been working at UMDNJ, now Rutgers University, after UMDNJ’s merger with RMS. His career began with the Laboratory Computer Network (LCN) and Scientific Computing group, as a Data Base Systems Programmer, developing database applications across a range of operating systems and networking environments. During his tenure at LCN, he and V.A. Shiva Dr. Ayyadurai, the inventor of email, were colleagues from 1978 to 1982. His work today focuses on supporting various academic computing initiatives at Rutgers.
by Robert Field
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
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The Third Article in The History of Email Series
What we know today as “email” is really a system - a system of interlocking parts, each of which is essential for ordinary people to communicate effectively with one or many others, in an environment where different kinds of information must be shared (memos, documents, files, etc.) i.e. the modern office environment.
In 1978, I was a colleague of Shiva Ayyadurai’s at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, NJ. Shiva and I worked together in the modern office environment of the 1970s, where information sharing, primarily through the printed-paper medium, was the modus operandi.
First page of the computer program showing Shiva’s naming the program “email”, thus defining email to be the electronic interoffice mail system.
Much of my effort at the time was dedicated to managing database software systems. Though Shiva was nearly 20 years younger than me, neither I nor the other Lab members thought of Shiva as a kid or a student. His professionalism, programming capabilities, attention to detail, and commitment to producing software that was user-friendly and reliable, was extraordinary.
His supervisor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson challenged Shiva to create an electronic system that would emulate the interoffice mail system, then in use at UMDNJ. My interaction was one of being a sounding board for Shiva, time-to-time, on database functions and operating systems issues such as memory management. I recall, in particular, Shiva’s incredible persistence to face a technical problem head on, and to solve it.
As a former colleague of Shiva’s, I hope my writing this article, as a part of this History of Email Series, provides details on the first email system created at UMDNJ in 1978.
The Interoffice Mail System
Many people over the age of 40, myself included, will remember the interoffice paper mail system, which was the basis of how offices around the world operated, from the level of secretaries to CEOs. The interoffice mail system had the following interlocked parts (as detailed in Table 1 below), which are the now-familiar components of email: Inbox, the Memo (“To:”, “From:”, “Date:”, “Subject:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”), Forwarding, Composing, Drafts, Edit, Reply, Delete, Priorities, Outbox, Folders, Archive, Attachments, Return Receipt, Carbon Copies (including Blind Carbon Copies), Sorting, Address Book, Groups, Bulk Distribution.
The interoffice mail system was not only used across offices but also inter-departmentally and inter-organizationally, some referring to it also as the inter-departmental or inter-organizational mail system, respectively. In this article, we consistently refer to the mail system as the interoffice mail system.
The interoffice mail system at UMDNJ was complicated, consisting of many components. In Table 1, below, is a detailed listing of the parts of the interoffice paper mail system, in use at UMDNJ in 1978, along with their detailed descriptions. If you took away any one component or part, such as the ability to attach other materials (Attachments) or the use of Folders or the ability to send Carbon Copies, your ability to function and communicate with co-workers was greatly impaired in the office environment. This is why it was a “system”, because you needed all the components to work together.
TABLE 1
The Parts and Detailed Description of the Interoffice Mail System at UMDNJ (1978).
INBOX
This was the physical Inbox where a secretary received incoming documents. It was usually made of wood, metal or plastic. The courier or “office boy” or “mailroom clerk” would deliver postal mail or interoffice memos into this Inbox. Deliveries into the Inbox were done at least twice per day. Sometimes, urgent messages were delivered on an ad hoc basis into the Inbox.
OUTBOX
This was a physical box made of metal, wood, or plastic, where outgoing postal mail or interoffice memos, which were composed, edited, an placed in an envelope, and addressed to the recipient, were made available for pickup and delivery to its recipients. A courier or “office boy” or “mailroom clerk” would come and pick up the items from the Outbox regularly, at least twice per day.
DRAFTS
This was a physical box made of metal, wood, or plastic to hold drafts of memos or letters, which were in the midst of being reviewed and edited. Typically, a secretary would write the memo and put in the Drafts box for review. A superior would then pickup, review and provide “red-line” feedback on the memo or letter, and place back into Drafts box. The secretary would retrieve the edited document, make changes, and place the edited document back in the Drafts box. After the superior gave instructions, the memo or document would be deemed as completed; the secretary would then place the memo in an envelope, and place it in the Outbox for pick up.
FOLDERS
Memos, documents and files were archived and organized in metal cabinets containing metal drawers. Within each drawer, one could organize, categorize and these items in manila folders within each drawer.
TYPEWRITER
A Typewriter was an instrument that allowed a person to create a Memo. It consisted of mechanical components corresponding to all the alphabets in the English language plus the 10 digits of the number system, as well as a number of other special characters. The Typewriter required paper and ink ribbon to convert strokes on the keyboard into letters on the paper. There were many styles of Typewriters, mechanical and later electrical.
MEMO
This was typically a piece of 8 1/2 by 11-inch piece of BOND paper. The top of the Memo had the words “++++++ MEMORANDUM ++++++” written on it and centered. Below, there were the following areas: “To:”, “From:”, “Date:”, “Subject:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:” (only for view in the sender’s original), and another section with “Encl.:”, if Attachment(s) were included. After the “Subject:”, there was typically a horizontal black line, after which the “Body:” of the memo appeared. Below the “Body:” were the names of people on “Cc:” list, and then the “Encl.:” list, listing the various Attachments.
ATTACHMENTS
A memo could have Attachments or enclosures such as another file folder, another document, a drawing or a photograph, or even a parcel.
CARBON COPIES
Carbon copies were copies of a Memo created by the secretary, who would typically place dark blue carbon paper between two Bond pieces of white paper and roll them into the typewriter, to create the copies. The Bond paper on top was the original, the paper below, was the “Carbon Copy” or “Cc:”. Sometimes, several Carbons were used, and sometimes if the “Cc:” list was too long, the original would be mimeographed on a mimeograph machine. Then, the original “To:” recipient would get the original, the top copy, and each person on the CC list would get copies. This got more complicated if there were multiple recipients in the “To:” field, or a Group in the “To:” field.
BLIND CARBON COPIES
Blind Carbon Copies enabled a secretary to send a Carbon Copy of a Memo to some people, that others on the “To:” and “Cc:” lists were purposely made to unaware, or “blind” except to the secretary who authored the Memo. The “Bcc:” list, in the header of the Memo, was kept by the sender/secretary, only, and others who got Carbon copies, those on the “Cc:” list, did not see e.g. they were “blind” to those receiving the Bcc’s. So only the sender knew who was on the Bcc list.
REGISTERED MEMO
In the office environment of the medical school and hospital at UMDNJ, this was a very important feature, because certain Memos had to be acknowledged as received. A Memo could be flagged as a “Registered Memo,” this would mean that it was treated differently. The delivery person would put it in a different color envelope and ensure that recipient signed a Return Receipt, before it was put into the Inbox. This would assure the sender that the recipient got the Memo.
RETURN RECEIPT
This was a formal receipt that a delivery person would make sure got signed by the recipient who had been sent a Registered Memo. This Return Receipt would then have to get sent back to the original sender.
ENVELOPE
The interoffice envelope was typically a bit larger than an 8 1/2 by 11-inch paper, and was normally gray or yellow in color. The envelope had a red string on the outside so it could be secured for ease of opening and reuse. The outside of the envelope provided columns and rows on which the sender and the recipient could be listed. After a recipient received the envelope, they could recycle the envelope by crossing out the previous sender and recipient and using the blank rows to write the new sender and recipient, name and address.
ADDRESS BOOK
Every office had an Address Book, which listed each person’s first and last names, location, Group affiliation (e.g. surgery, finance, pharmacology), room number and phone number. The Address Book was the cornerstone of each offices’ contact list.
GROUPS
A Group was listed next to someone’s name in the Address Book. Individuals could belong to different Groups. Groups included Surgery, Pharmacology, ICU, IT, etc. One nuance was that the Group names may be the same, but the Group was distinct based on the campus location. For example, the Pharmacology Group at one location may have different people, than the Pharmacology Group at another location. Each location had different people in different Groups.
TRASH BUCKET
A Trash Bucket was typically next to a secretary’s desk on the floor. The bucket was made of either plastic or metal, and was the location of where trash, such as old papers, garbage were deposited.
COMPOSING MEMO
Composing a Memo was done by the action of taking a blank piece of white Bond paper and placing it in the Typewriter. Sometimes, if errors were made during time, a white liquid substance in a small bottle jar, colloquially called “whiteout was used to erase mistakes, and then the typing was done over the whited out area.
SENDING MEMO TO INDIVIDUAL
Memo to an individual meant that the “To:” field had only the name of only one recipient.
SCANNING MAIL
Scanning mail was the process of quickly reading the Envelope in the Inbox, opening the Envelope and quickly reading the top portion of a Memo, such as the “From:”, “Subject:”, lines to get a quick idea whether to read the Memo immediately, discard it into the Trash Bucket to read first, to put for later review, or sometimes to discard altogether e.g. junk mail.
FORWARDING (OR REDISTRIBUTION)
A person receiving and reviewing an incoming Memo in the Inbox could Forward or Re-Distribute the Memo to others. Forwarding literally involved adding a list of other recipients who to review the Memo. This Forward list was sometimes just paper-clipped on the received Memo, and as the forwarded recipients read the Memo, they checked off their name on the paper-clipped list, and passed it on to the next recipient, who had not yet read the Memo.
FORWARDING WITH RETURN RECEIPT REQUESTED (OR REGISTERED MEMO)
This was an important feature to ensure receipt of a forwarded Memo by the recipient. Sometimes, an important Memo, say from a Director, would be received by a Manager, and that Manager wanted to ensure that certain employees in his group received the Memo. Forwarding with Return Receipt enabled the Manager to know exactly when and who got the Memo and who did not get the Memo. Prior to someone receiving the Memo in their Inbox, the delivery person, would not place the Envelope containing the Memo, it in their Inbox, until the recipient, signed the Return Receipt. The Return Receipts from each employee was sent back to the Manager, and thereby the Manager could the number of Return Receipts and know how many actually received the Memo.
EDITING
A memo sometimes would be edited after it was composed. Editing could be iterative based on the feedback received. Editing typically involved the use of whiteout or sometimes starting with new blank piece of paper and retyping the original Memo with the corrections. Editing relied on the use of the Drafts box, as this box served as the point of interaction between the secretary and her superior.
REPLYING
Sometimes instead of writing a new Memo, an individual Replied to a Memo received in the Inbox. When they replied to the Memo, they could either simply send the response Memo or attach the response Memo to the original Memo sent from the sender as an Attachment for the originating sender’s reference.
BROADCAST MEMO
Sometimes a Memo would need to be broadcasted, or sent, to multiple recipients, sometimes hundreds, not just one individual. This involved listing multiple names of recipients in the “To:” field. The original Memo was created with the listing of all people’s names on the “To:” field. Then that original Memo was copied using the carbon paper to copy, if the list was small, or the original Memo was simply mimeographed. Then each copy was stuffed in an Envelope and placed in the Outbox.
SENDING MEMO TO GROUP
In a large organization, within and across facilities, there were different departments such as Pharmacology, Finance, Administration, Surgery, etc., and one may want to send a Memo to a department or Group. A Group involved a listing of many recipients. However, in the “To:” field only the name of the Group would appear. The secretary would then have to look up in the Address Book and print mailing labels for each individual in that Group, and send a copy of the Memo to each recipient; alternatively, sometimes only one copy of the Group Memo was sent to on address, and the recipient, the secretary or administrator of the Group, on the other end, would make copies of the Memo, and distribute it to members of the Group.
DELETING
Sometimes a memo would be thrown into the Trash Bucket for disposal.
PURGING
The contents of Trash Bucket, by request, would be collected and be destroyed.
UPDATING ADDRESS BOOK
Address Books were updated as employees came and left the organization. New people were added, and those who had left were removed. Sometimes a circular was sent out which was the update to the existing Address Book, and one would have to manually insert the changes in an existing Address Book.
PRIORITIZATION
When mail was left in the Inbox, it sometimes was sorted based on some priority, and marked, such as High, Medium or Low by the secretary. And some secretaries, had file folders, for sorting these three categories of Memos.
ARCHIVING
Not all Memos were discarded after they were read. Some Memos were to be kept for storage, and were often put into an archive file cabinet and organized for long–term record keeping.
UNDELIVERABLE NOTIFICATION
Sometimes a Memo could not be delivered even after many Retries. In this case, the delivery person would take the Memo back to the sender with a note on it saying “Undeliverable”.
RETRIES
All mail had to be delivered, or a real effort was made to keep trying to deliver it before being deemed Undeliverable. This meant a policy of “retries” as many as 3 to 5 times, before the attempts were stopped. The number of Retries was a policy decision of the organization.
SECURING DELIVERY
All mail had to be securely delivered. This meant that only the designated recipient had to receive it. Typically this was ensured, as the delivery person knew who was who and knew the secretaries. Moreover, Memos were put in an individual sealed envelope, with a string closure or taped, so they could not be easily opened during transit.
TRANSPORTING
All mail needed to be transported. There were many ways of Transporting. The delivery person could physically pick up the mail and deliver from local office to office, on foot. Another forms of transporting were using pneumatic tubes, in which the Envelope was placed. The pneumatic tubes were sent on a system of train-track-like rails, form office to office. Mail among different buildings and campuses was transported by cars or trucks.
SORTING
Different locations had mail Sorting facilities, where the mail would come in, be sorted by groups, departments, locations, zip code, office numbers, so the delivery was easier. Within each office, the secretary would also perform sorting operations by a memo’s priority, source, etc.
If you did not know what the interoffice mail system was, before reading this article, I hope Table 1 was educational and provided you a detailed understanding of this paper-based system. Moreover, you will observe a near 1-to-1 correspondence with the parts of the interoffice mail system, itemized in Table 1, and the email system you are using today.
Email As We Know It Was Invented at UMDNJ
In 1978, Shiva conceived and developed an electronic system that replicated all the functions of UMDNJ’s entire interoffice paper mail system, as itemized in Table 1 above.
He named the system “email”, a name that, based on extensive document review, was first introduced and brought into use as his system spread throughout the UMDNJ campuses. This name was assigned to his program for both convenience and out of necessity since the FORTRAN IV programming language, which “email” was written in, required all variables to be in upper case and the RTE-IV operating system had a five-character limit for program names - thus, Shiva concatenated the letters “E”, ”M”, ”A”, ”I”, ”L” to name his program.
In 1978, those five juxtaposed characters had never been used before in the modern English language. While this term may seem obvious to us today, in 1978, it was not.
Table 2 provides a list of all the features that Shiva implemented into the first email system. As you can see, this system was not a “simple” system for just exchanging text messages. It was a full-scale version of the interoffice mail system in an electronic format.
This was email.
TABLE 2
The Parts of Email, the First Email System as Implemented in the Computer Program Invented by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai at UMDNJ (1978)
Interoffice Mail System Parts in the First Email System
Inbox
All Fields of Interoffice MemoTo:
From:
Subject: (70 chars length)
Date:
Body:
Cc:
Bcc:
Sending Memo to Individual
Saving a Memo as a Draft
Scanning Mail
Forwarding (or Redistribution)
Forwarding with RETURN RECEIPT (or registered memo)
Composing Memo
Drafts
Editing
Outbox
Replying
Broadcast Memo
Sending Memo to Group
Deleting
Purging
Address Book
Updating Address Book
Searching the Address BookBy Group
By User Name (short name)
By Last Name
By Zipnode (node or location)
Prioritization
Archiving
Carbon Copies
Blind Carbon Copies
Groups
Registered Memo
Return Receipt
Undeliverable Notification
Retries
Secure Delivery – Using username and password
AttachmentsAttaching to a memo
Creating Attachments from scratch
Saving attachments
Attachment editor
Transmission of memo
Multi-Level User Access – User, Manager, Postmaster, System Administrator
Sorting
Memo Formatting – Formatting functions to make sure that a memo on the screen when printed looked akin to the typewritten memo.
PrintingPrint all mail
Print selected memos
Print only the “envelopes”, To, From, Subject, Date
Formatted printing --- memo looked like typewritten one
Exporting of MailExport a single memo to a file
Export a set of memos to a file
Group Management --- Postmaster/Administrator LevelCreating Groups
Deleting Groups
Placing User in a Group
Deleting User from a Group
Displaying Groups
Restricting Group Access --- Particular users could send to certain groups. E.g. Only Postmaster could send to “ALL” for global broadcast.
Postmaster & Systems Administrator FunctionsReports on mail usage by user
Deleting aged mail
Shutdown of the entire system
Startup of the entire system
Deleting Users
Adding Users
Adding a “Zipnode”, new network
Deleting a Zipnode
Disabling a User from logging in to the user interface
Direct starting of mail transmission
Integrated System ComponentsEasy-To-Use User Interface
Word-processor
Integrated Attachment Editor
Relational Database Engine
Modular Inter-Process Communication Protocol
Print Manager for Formatted Printing
Systems Administrator Console
Post Master Console
Email was delivered as one holistic platform, that integrated an easy-to-use interface, and a word processor, all built from scratch by Shiva, as well as a relational database (to support folders, archival, sorting and many other features not possible with flat-file based approaches), with a modular intercommunications protocol.
In 1978, UMDNJ had four campus locations in New Jersey: Newark, Piscataway, Camden, and New Brunswick. Shiva and I worked out of the Newark campus. Workers on these campuses began using email as a public and commercially viable system starting in 1978, when we released the first version. At that time, any one who used a computer on the network, had to login. They were billed for hours of usage for the applications they chose to use. Email was one of these applications.
Shiva solely built the entire system, nearly 50,000 lines of code, using a high-level programming language (FORTRAN IV) and HP IMAGE/1000 database system. He was the sole author of this email system, designing and writing all the code. Dr. Leslie P. Michelson’s article “The Invention of Email”, which is also part of this series, provides additional details from Dr. Michelson’s interactions with Shiva at UMDNJ.
Unlike the developments on the ARPAnet, email was built to address a systems problem in the ordinary office situation using local area and wide area networks (LANs and WANs), where computers across offices and multiple campuses were connected --- independent of the ARPAnet. None of us in the Lab at UMDNJ had any contact with the ARPAnet. The first email system was meant to be a widely shared system of ongoing communication by ordinary workers, not computer scientists who knew code.
Email was developed with a focus on user-friendliness and high-reliability, and deployed as a commercial product, where nearly 500 office workers accessed, and used it. In 1981, Shiva was awarded a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Award for inventing email.
V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai received Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Award for invention of email system
Since patenting of software was not available in 1978, Shiva had to wait until 1980, when it became possible to protect software inventions by Copyright. In 1981, he applied for protection of his software, and was awarded two US copyrights in 1982.
Official US Copyright Notice for “Email” Issued on August 30, 1982, now in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (NMAH).
One Copyright was for “Email”, “Computer Program for Electronic Mail System”, and the other Copyright was for the User’s Manual. He wrote the User’s Manual with the idea that anybody in an office setting could learn and adapt to his system. He had customers to serve!
Email Is Not Simply An Exchange of Messages
So email as a system is not simply exchanging messages among computers, even if a person at one end types a message to a human recipient. Sending text messages alone is what today we call Texting, SMS, Chat or Twitter.
Standard histories of the Internet are full of claims that certain individuals (and teams) in the ARPAnet environment in the 1970s and 1980s “invented email.” For example, the “@” sign, early programs for sending and receiving messages, and technical specifications known as RFCs, have been claimed to be “email.” But as some claimants have admitted, none of these innovations were intended as a system of interlocking parts Inbox, Memo, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, etc. the email system used today by billions of people worldwide.
The standard histories have used the term “email” - which today is understood to be a system of interdependent features - to apply to other forms of electronic communication. Those developments aimed to solve various problems, but were not intended to substitute for the interoffice paper mail system.
These claims have been compiled in an article called the “The Five Myths About Email” by Dr. Deborah J. Nightingale, an eminent enterprise systems architect and former Director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. This article is a summary of her and Dr. Sen Song's original work posted as False Claims on http://www.inventorofemail.com. Research across hundreds of primary sources concerning these claims shows that each of these innovations - while very important in the evolution of the Internet - were single functions and never a system of interlocked components intended to emulate the interoffice paper mail system.
Conclusion
Members of our Lab kept in touch with Shiva. His work with email continued over the past thirty-five years, even after he left our Lab. From 1978 to 1984, he continued to enhance and evolve his invention at UMDNJ. In 1993, he went on to invent EchoMail, a platform for intelligent email management, growing out of work with the US White House.
During 1993 to 2003, EchoMail became one of the leading email management and email marketing companies for Global 2000 organizations. In early 2000, Shiva began the Email Research Institute, which is now known as the Email Lab, a division of the International Center for Integrative Systems, and aims to provide fundamental research about email. EchoMail, as I understand, now makes its technology accessible to small and mid-sized businesses. Today, he serves as Director of the Email Lab as well as a Board member of EchoMail, Inc.
As to his 1978 invention, on February 16, 2012, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC held a donation ceremony to accept the 50,000 lines of computer code, tapes, papers and other artifacts documenting the invention of email at UMDNJ. All of us, who were colleagues of Shiva, were proud of this event and happy that he received this well-deserved recognition.
An article about the donation ceremony in the Washington Post led to a series of counterclaims, and personal attacks on him. These events inspired those who had worked with Shiva in 1978 as well as some of his other colleagues to develop the website http://www.inventorofemail.com to share the facts about email’s invention.
As the website documents, industry insiders, loyal to Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar defense company, had created their entire brand, bearing the ‘@’ logo, based on claims of having “invented email”. This group unleashed a vicious public relations campaign. This campaign aimed to discredit email’s origins, intimidate journalists who did not parrot their claims, and assassinate Shiva’s character, while defending and promoting Raytheon/BBN’s brand as the “inventor of email” in the lucrative and competitive cyber-security market.
The leaders of these attacks included David Crocker, a member of the ARPAnet research community starting in 1972, and “historians” and “experts”, either former or current employees of Raytheon/BBN or close associates.
Systems and Software Consortium, Inc. (SSCI) is the new name of the Software Productivity Consortium, SSCI President and CEO Dr. Jim Kane announced today. SSCI is a non-profit consortium where leading aerospace, defense, IT, financial industry, educational and government organizations collaborate on the challenges faced in building critical systems. Coupled with its new identity, the Consortium also launched a new website (http://www.systemsandsoftware.org) to better inform its members, employees and the public about the evolving, dynamic and critical mission of SSCI.
SSCI President and CEO Dr. Jim Kane said, "Our focus is clearly on our members' needs. We have realigned our current offerings and are investing more heavily in new solutions that help members manage risk, advance the business value of their systems engineering activities, and drive business performance."
SSCI solutions are now focused on delivering value in three key areas:
* Value-driven process improvement, where SSCI's unique expertise in systems and software process improvement helps members implement high- maturity, measurable processes to increase quality and productivity
while reducing cycle time.
* Lifecycle strategies for complex systems, including minimizing risk, designing and validating architectures, defining system requirements and interfaces, implementing team approaches, and improving mission assurance.
* Integrating systems and software engineering through proven engineering methods for agile, secure systems development, effective project management, in-depth measurement and analysis, and automated testing and verification.
These solutions reflect an increased emphasis on serving members' needs in complex systems and software development.
Dr. Kane added, "Part of the challenge we face is keeping our members up to date and aware of industry changes and accompanying solutions developed through the Consortium. Our new name and website help us better serve our
members, and convey our core focus more efficiently."
SSCI will continue in its successful collaborative assistance through delivering software process expertise, much like in past contributions with Consortium members in key DoD programs like the DD(X) next generation surface combatant ship and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
About the Systems and Software Consortium, Inc. (SSCI)
SSCI is a nonprofit partnership of the nation's leading systems integrators and federal government contractors, as well as selected government affiliates, exclusively focused on helping its members improve the business performance of their systems and software programs. SSCI delivers value by improving systems and software engineering tools and methods that members can apply to their programs resulting in better performance and greater efficiencies. The Consortium also offers members a trusted environment in which to collaborate on common problems and jointly invest in solution development. Current industry members include, BAE Systems, Boeing, Citigroup, CSC, EDS, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Unisys, UTC, and others. For more information see
http://www.systemsandsoftware.org.
-- Systems and Software Consortium, Inc. (SSCI) is New Name for SPC. Name and Website Reflect Expanding Focus on Member Needs, by Systems and Software Consortium, Inc.
Mr. Crocker, during his attacks, however, had omitted an important fact, to the press and media. In December of 1977, months before Shiva invented email in 1978, Mr. Crocker had authored a historical document for the eminent RAND Corporation, where he summarized the history of electronic messaging by his colleagues, up until December of 1977. In that document, Mr. Crocker had stated:
"At this time, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system [p.4]…. The fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users' needs. [p.7]”
— Crocker, David. Framework and Function of the "MS" Personal Message System. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1977.
Since the system is to be used for communication which is exemplified in older and heavily-exercised technology, it is assumed that users have an extensive conceptual model of the communication domain. It is further assumed that a system which performs in ways which deviate from that model will be viewed as "idiosyncratic" and impeding the efforts of the user. Problems occurring during this sort of interaction can be expected to be as irritating as having a pen which leaks or a typewriter with keys that jam. Therefore, a major design goal for MS is to provide an integrated set of necessary and sufficient functions which conform to the target user's cognitive model of a regular office-memo system. At this stage, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale inter-organization mail system....
The level of the MS project effort has also had a major effect upon the system's design. To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible with MS. In addition, the fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to users' needs. Consequently, important segments of a full message environment have received little or no attention and decisions have been made with the expectation that other Unix capabilities will be used to augment MS. For example, MS has fairly primitive data-base management (i.e., filing and cataloging) facilities and message folders have been implemented in a way which allows them to be modified by programs, such as text editors, which access them directly, rather than through the message system.
-- Framework and Functions of the "MS" Personal Message System: A Report prepared for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, by David H. Crocker
From the beginning of his joining our research group, Shiva, however, had a singular intention to emulate the full-scale version of the interoffice paper mail system, with the precise goal of addressing the “various organizational contexts”, with “users of differing expertise” such as secretaries, doctors and students at UMDNJ, unlike the ARPAnet researchers.
He did “attempt” and did do the “impossible” to respond to “all users’ needs” by inventing email - the system of interlocking parts replicating the interoffice mail system - the email we all experience today, which Mr. Crocker and his contemporaries had concluded was “impossible”.
In spite of the overwhelming facts of email’s invention by Shiva in 1978 at UMDNJ, detractors and “historians”, part of the ARPAnet community as well as supporters of Raytheon/BBN, unleashed a campaign of historical revisionism in journals and other media to attempt to redefine “email” and to state that no one could have “invented email”. Their attempts at such historical revisionism are also documented on http://www.inventorofemail.com.
In filing for the Copyright, the United States Copyright Office made Shiva’s work products, such as the User’s Manual and portions of his code, publicly available; anyone in the world could have access to it. Shortly after his invention, from 1982 onwards, other products with the same functions and interlocked components used in Shiva’s program “email” appeared in rapid succession (see the History of Email Infographic).
Shiva’s distinction as inventor of email is not to suggest that someone else, at some point in history, would not have created a full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system (and perhaps called it something else), independent of his invention. The advances in computing and networking, and a growing desire to automate paper-based functions, would have eventually led to the creation of such a system. However, Shiva was the first to create such a system, to call it “email”, and, the first, to receive formal recognition by the United States Government for its invention.
This article, I hope, clarifies what “email” is and what it is not, as well as Shiva’s role as the inventor of email in 1978, while at UMDNJ, and finally, his commitment throughout his career to evolving email to benefit the general public.
About Robert Field
Robert Field is a Senior IST Technologist at Rutgers Medical School (RMS) in the school of Biomedical Sciences. For nearly 40 years, Mr. Field has been working at UMDNJ, now Rutgers University, after UMDNJ’s merger with RMS. His career began with the Laboratory Computer Network (LCN) and Scientific Computing group, as a Data Base Systems Programmer, developing database applications across a range of operating systems and networking environments. During his tenure at LCN, he and V.A. Shiva Dr. Ayyadurai, the inventor of email, were colleagues from 1978 to 1982. His work today focuses on supporting various academic computing initiatives at Rutgers.
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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The Five Myths About Email’s History
by Deborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D.
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
The Fourth Article in The History of Email Series
(An extract from False Claims About Email)
This article exposes five myths about the origin of email:
These myths have been perpetuated through the misuses of the term “email” to refer to methods for the simple exchange of text messages as email. Methods for simply exchanging text messages date back to the Morse code telegraph of the 1800s, the genesis of short messaging such as SMS, Texting, Instant Messaging and Twitter, but certainly not email.
Prior to 1978, the term “email” did not even exist in the modern English language, as verified by the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster, two of the world’s most eminent dictionaries.
Email was precisely defined in 1978 when V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, then 14-years-old, created the term “email” to name his computer program, which was the first full-scale electronic replication of the interoffice mail system consisting of the now-familiar components of email: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Attachments, Memo, Address Book, Forwarding, Composing, etc., the system we all experience today in other email systems as Gmail, HotMail, Yahoo!
Sometime after Shiva’s invention of email in 1978, a group of industry insiders, public relations experts and “historians” loyal to Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar company which had predicated its entire brand on the claim it had “invented email”, began purposely misusing the term “email” to refer to its developments in text messaging, done prior to 1978 as “email”, in order to hijack credit for the invention from the 14-year-old boy.
A Fabricated “Controversy”
When Shiva was given international recognition, following the Smithsonian’s acquisition of his computer code, papers and artifacts, documenting his invention of email, these industry insiders then resorted to fabricating a “controversy” to confuse journalists and the public on email’s true origins.
As Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor and one of the world’s most respected scholars of our time, observed, in Wired:
What sparked this “controversy” was that the documentation unequivocally proved that Shiva, as a 14-year-old boy in 1978, was the first to create the electronic version of the interoffice mail system; the first to call it “email”, a term he coined that did not exist in the English language; and the first to receive formal and official recognition for the invention by the U.S. Government.
When a young Washington Post reporter shared these facts, in a feature article shortly following the Smithsonian acquisition, she and the editorial board of the Washington Post were attacked and barraged by this coterie of industry insiders including consultants, employees, alumni and an "Internet cabal", as referred by Boston Magazine, of SIGCIS “historians” with ties to Raytheon/BBN.
During this melee, Noam Chomsky responded, “What continue[s] to be deplorable are the childish tantrums of industry insiders who now believe that by creating confusion … they can distract attention from the facts.”
These tantrums were sensationalized by tabloids such as Gizmodo, the Blaze, TechDirt, and the Verge, which did little primary research, rather simply parroting and escalating the vitriol, defamation and character assassination of Shiva, while attacking and bullying journalists, including technology editors such as Doug Aamoth of TIME, who had earlier written a well-researched piece, The Man Who Invented Email, based on reviewing the actual documentation.
In the midst of the chaos and confusion, the Washington Post responded by appeasing the childish behavior of these insiders by a “Mea Culpa” and “corrections”. The Washington Post did a significant disservice to the public, by not having the courage to stand by the documented facts, and not doing the primary research on the myths and claims made by these industry insiders, which would have revealed the significant economic interests behind the vitriol and defamation to discredit Shiva’s work.
Setting the Record Straight
I am pleased to provide an extract of five key myths of the facts of email's origin, based on the misuses of the term "email".
Popular sites such as Wikipedia, unfortunately, continue to promulgate the myths of email’s history. Industry insiders dominate and monopolize such forums, and immediately remove even documented citations and facts, which expose and counter their false claims on email’s origin.
There is a simple way to understand the myths about email’s history by realizing a single and fundamental concept: Email is a System.
As an MIT professor, who led MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center for nearly half a decade, and served on the faculty in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division for over 17 years, my research has focused on systems and, specifically, developing new methodologies for architecting large-scale enterprise systems.
I spent nearly 40 years of my career helping some of the largest global companies in the world as well as military organizations understand the complexity of such large-scale systems in order to enhance their performance.
So, I know a bit about systems.
The classic definition of a system, by the eminent systems scientist Eberhardt Rechtin, is:
Email, by definition, as a system, is a set of different elements, so connected, as to be the direct electronic emulation of the interoffice mail system, as Robert Field has explained in The First Email System. The interoffice mail system consisted of the now-familiar components of email: Inbox, the Memo (“To:”, “From:”, “Date:”, “Subject:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”), Forwarding, Composing, Drafts, Edit, Reply, Delete, Priorities, Outbox, Folders, Archive, Attachments, Return Receipt, Carbon Copies (including Blind Carbon Copies), Sorting, Address Book, Groups, Bulk Distribution, etc.
The elements of email, which Shiva invented, functioned together to provide the foundations of complex interoffice, inter-departmental, inter-organizational communications. If you took away any one element or part of this system, such as the ability to attach other materials, Attachments, or the use of Folders or the ability to Forward or Prioritize, your ability to function and communicate with co-workers was greatly impaired in the office environment.
This is why email is a “system”, because you needed all elements to function cohesively together for office communications to take place.
When we understand that email is a system, we can realize that there is no “controversy” except the one fabricated by those insiders to confuse and convince us that email existed prior to 1978.
MYTH #1: “EMAIL” WAS CREATED ON THE ARPANET
This statement is a misuse of the term “email”, since the invention referenced in this statement is command-line protocols for the simple transfer of electronic text messages, not email – the electronic replication of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system.
ARPANET researchers, as history shows, were never interested in creating email. The famous RAND Report written by David Crocker, a leading ARPANET researcher, in December of 1977, is unequivocal as to the lack of intention of ARPANET researchers to create email, the inter-organizational mail system.
In December of 1977, Mr. Crocker wrote:
The ARPANET researchers were focused on creating methods for the simple exchange of text messages, in the lineage of the telegraph, and not on creating an electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system.
During the Civil War, the military, for example, relied on the telegraph as a core and strategic medium of communication for sending short text messages. The telegraph inspired continuing work by military research organizations. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for example, funded the ARPANET to develop methods for transport of simple text messages across computers during the 1960s and 1970s.
The purpose of the telegraph, unlike the interoffice mail system, was to transport text messages electronically across wires, using cryptic codes.
Telegraph operators sending and receiving text messages.
The interoffice system, unlike the telegraph, was a system used for transporting interoffice paper mail across offices, departments, organizations and buildings, using people, cars, trucks and pneumatic tubes that were prevalent across many offices.
Pneumatic tubes, a critical component of the interoffice mail system.
Just as the telegraph was not the interoffice mail system, the ARAPNET work was not email, but at best was a precursor to what we know today as Texting or Text Messaging. Therefore, statements that claim email was invented by the ARPANET are simply false and conflate the ARPANET work.
In fact, prior to 1978, the ARPANET referred to their work as “Text Messaging” or “Messaging” never as “email”. After the invention of email by Shiva in 1978, ARPANET alumni began to refer to their work as “email”.
This important distinction between the telegraph and the interoffice mail system helps us to understand the myth of the statement that “Email was created on the ARPANET”.
The military had little interest in sending interoffice memoranda on the battlefield in the 1970s - this is not what ARPANET was built for.
MYTH #2: RAY TOMLINSON INVENTED "EMAIL" AND SENT THE FIRST "EMAIL" MESSAGE
This statement is a misuse of the term “email” since Ray Tomlinson did not invent email - the electronic replication of of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. The invention referenced in such statements and attributed to Mr. Tomlinson is the simple exchange of text messages between computers.
In fact, what Mr. Tomlinson did was to simply modify a pre-existing program called SNDMSG, which he himself did not write. The minor modifications he made enabled the exchange of simple text messages across computers. The resulting SNDMSG however, was unusable by ordinary people, and required a set of highly technical computer codes that the sender had to type to transfer a message from one computer to another. Such cryptic codes were far too technical, and could not be used by a secretary or office worker.
As historical references demonstrate, SNDMSG, far from being email, was at best, a very rudimentary form of text messaging. As John Vittal, an early leading pioneer in electronic messaging researcher, observed:
Moreover, Mr. Tomlinson, to his own admission said that what he created was a “no-brainer” and a minor contribution.
SNDMSG was less than a rudimentary form of text messging, and a far cry from email, the system created by Shiva which consisted of 50,000 lines of code that was the full-scale emulation of the entire interoffice mail system, by definition.
MYTH #3: THE “@” SYMBOL EQUALS THE INVENTION OF "EMAIL"
This is a misuse of the term “email” since it implies that the “@” symbol is equivalent to inventing email - the electronic replication of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system.
The “@” symbol is used in an email address to separate the user name from the domain name. The invention referenced in the above statement is the use of the “@” symbol to distinguish two computers when sending a text message. The “@” symbol is not a necessary component to distinguish two computers, in some cases “-at” was used, as verified by Tom Van Vleck:
In the first email system developed by Shiva, the symbol “.” was used to distinguish different computers. Equating the “@” symbol with the invention of email was a major branding and public relations effort of Raytheon/BBN. The “@” symbol is not email.
As M.A. Padlipsky, the eminent electronic messaging pioneer, an MIT graduate, a member of the ARPANET team, and a close contemporary of Mr. Tomlinson, observed of Raytheon/BNN’s long history of self-promotional activities:
To conclude, the creation of the “@” symbol to distinguish computers, does not in any way equate to the invention of email.
MYTH #4: RFCS DEMONSTRATE "EMAIL" EXISTED PRIOR TO 1978
Requests for Comments (RFCs) were simply written documentations, not an email computer program, nor an email system. RFCs were literally meeting notes that recorded the meetings of electronic messaging researchers in the 1970s. As such, this is a flagrant misuse of the term “email”.
For example, sensationalist statements, such as the one by issued by Gizmodo in 2012 stating:
are, at best misinformed, and completely lack understanding that email was the electronic interoffice mail system. Furthermore, email does not need the Internet to operate. Email systems initially ran on Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Local Area Networks (LANs), independent of the Internet and ARPANET. In fact, even today, one doesn’t need the Internet to run email.
Moreover, RFC 733 was a document to define an attempted standard that was never even fully accepted. The very term “RFC” means “Request for Comments”. It was a document created from meeting notes, and proposed ideas for message format and transmission, but said little about feature sets of individual electronic messaging or mail systems.
As the opening of RFC 733, it states:
Therefore, RFCs do not demonstrate that email existed prior to 1978. What RFCs demonstrate are that meetings and discussions were taking place on defining methods to exchange text messages, not the creation of email.
MYTH #5: CTSS, DEVELOPED IN 1960's, IS "EMAIL"
This is a misuse of the term “email” since the reference to CTSS MAIL (Computer Time Sharing System), the method referenced and attributed to MIT, was an early text messaging system, not a version of email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice mail system.
This invention, MAIL, allowed a CTSS user to transmit a file, written in a third-party editor, and encoded in binary-coded decimal format (BCD), to other CTSS users. The delivered message would be appended to the front of a file in the recipient’s directory that represented the aggregate of all received messages. This flat-file message storage placed strict constraints on the capacity of MAIL, and required users to traverse and review all messages one-by-one; search and sort mechanisms were not available.
The design choices in MAIL—lack of search and sort facilities, need for an external editor, dependence on CTSS-specific user IDs, and flat-file message storage—put strict constraints on the use and capacity of the command. It was well-suited to the low-volume transmission of informal (i.e. unformatted) messages, like text messaging of today.
The creator of MAIL, Tom Van Vleck, admitted this fact. Van Vleck stated:
Those who promoted MAIL as "email," when the term "email" did not even exist in 1965, were attempting to redefine "email" as a command-driven program that transferred BCD-encoded text files, written in an external editor, among timesharing system users, to be reviewed serially in a flat-file.
One would be hard-pressed to draw a historical straight line from MAIL to today’s email systems. MAIL was not "email", but a text messaging command line system, at best. Historically, one can give credit to MAIL as a predecessor of today’s electronic bulletin board systems or modern blog postings.
CONCLUSION
Email is a system of interconnected parts that was designed with a clear aim to emulate another system: the interoffice paper-based mail system, a system of interlocking parts Inbox, Memo, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, etc. the elements of the email system used today by billions of people worldwide.
From our review of the five myths about email, one can understand developments such as the ARPANET efforts, early programs for sending and receiving messages, the “@” sign, technical specifications known as RFCs, and MAIL, which were claimed to be “email”, were not email - the system of interlocked parts for emulating the interoffice mail system.
Those developments, while significant to the advancement of the Internet, aimed to solve various problems, but were not intended to substitute for the interoffice paper mail system --- email.
Acknowledgements
For those interested in the unabridged version of this article, kindly refer to the False Claims section on http://www.inventorofemail.com which Dr. Sen Song and I organized and edited in 2012. Our compiling, editing and organizing the claims would not have been possible without the Herculean efforts of Devon Sparks and Lorraine Monetti, who discovered and annotated the documents, referenced therein.
About Deborah J. Nightingale
Deborah J. NightingaleDeborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D. is a world-renowned expert in enterprise systems transformation and architecting. For nearly 17 years, Dr. Nightingale served as a Professor of Practice of Engineering Systems, and Aerospace and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For the past nearly half a decade, she led the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. Today, she works with some of world’s leading organizations, bringing her strategic systems thinking approaches to transform their enterprises to achieve desired capabilities such as sustainability, flexibility or enhanced innovation and entrepreneurship.
Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Nightingale headed up Strategic Planning and Global Business Development for AlliedSignal Engines. While at AlliedSignal she also held a number of executive leadership positions in operations, engineering, and program management, participating in enterprise-wide operations from concept development to customer support. Prior to joining AlliedSignal, she worked at Wright-Patterson AFB where she served as program manager for computer simulation modeling research, design, and development in support of advanced man-machine design concepts.
Dr. Nightingale has a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Industrial and Systems Engineering. In addition, she holds MS and BS degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University and University of Dayton, respectively. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Past-President and Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Enterprise Transformation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Beyond the Lean Revolution: Achieving Successful and Sustainable Enterprise Transformation and Architecting the Future Enterprise (Spring 2015, MIT Press). Dr. Nightingale is a frequent keynote speaker and serves on a number of boards and national committees, where she interacts extensively with industry, government and academic leaders.
by Deborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D.
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The Fourth Article in The History of Email Series
(An extract from False Claims About Email)
This article exposes five myths about the origin of email:
Myth #1: “Email was created on the ARPANET”
Myth #2: “Ray Tomlinson invented ‘email’ and sent the first ‘email’”
Myth #3: “The ‘@’ symbol equals the invention of ‘email’”
Myth #4: “RFCs demonstrate ‘email’ existed prior to 1978”
Myth #5: “CTSS, developed in 1960s, is ‘email’
These myths have been perpetuated through the misuses of the term “email” to refer to methods for the simple exchange of text messages as email. Methods for simply exchanging text messages date back to the Morse code telegraph of the 1800s, the genesis of short messaging such as SMS, Texting, Instant Messaging and Twitter, but certainly not email.
Prior to 1978, the term “email” did not even exist in the modern English language, as verified by the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster, two of the world’s most eminent dictionaries.
Email was precisely defined in 1978 when V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, then 14-years-old, created the term “email” to name his computer program, which was the first full-scale electronic replication of the interoffice mail system consisting of the now-familiar components of email: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Attachments, Memo, Address Book, Forwarding, Composing, etc., the system we all experience today in other email systems as Gmail, HotMail, Yahoo!
Sometime after Shiva’s invention of email in 1978, a group of industry insiders, public relations experts and “historians” loyal to Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar company which had predicated its entire brand on the claim it had “invented email”, began purposely misusing the term “email” to refer to its developments in text messaging, done prior to 1978 as “email”, in order to hijack credit for the invention from the 14-year-old boy.
A Fabricated “Controversy”
When Shiva was given international recognition, following the Smithsonian’s acquisition of his computer code, papers and artifacts, documenting his invention of email, these industry insiders then resorted to fabricating a “controversy” to confuse journalists and the public on email’s true origins.
As Noam Chomsky, MIT Institute Professor and one of the world’s most respected scholars of our time, observed, in Wired:
“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 [by the ARPANET], there is no ‘controversy’ here, except the one created by industry insiders, who have a vested interest.”
-- (Wired, Who Invented Email, Just Ask…Noam Chomsky, June 6, 2012)
What sparked this “controversy” was that the documentation unequivocally proved that Shiva, as a 14-year-old boy in 1978, was the first to create the electronic version of the interoffice mail system; the first to call it “email”, a term he coined that did not exist in the English language; and the first to receive formal and official recognition for the invention by the U.S. Government.
When a young Washington Post reporter shared these facts, in a feature article shortly following the Smithsonian acquisition, she and the editorial board of the Washington Post were attacked and barraged by this coterie of industry insiders including consultants, employees, alumni and an "Internet cabal", as referred by Boston Magazine, of SIGCIS “historians” with ties to Raytheon/BBN.
During this melee, Noam Chomsky responded, “What continue[s] to be deplorable are the childish tantrums of industry insiders who now believe that by creating confusion … they can distract attention from the facts.”
These tantrums were sensationalized by tabloids such as Gizmodo, the Blaze, TechDirt, and the Verge, which did little primary research, rather simply parroting and escalating the vitriol, defamation and character assassination of Shiva, while attacking and bullying journalists, including technology editors such as Doug Aamoth of TIME, who had earlier written a well-researched piece, The Man Who Invented Email, based on reviewing the actual documentation.
In the midst of the chaos and confusion, the Washington Post responded by appeasing the childish behavior of these insiders by a “Mea Culpa” and “corrections”. The Washington Post did a significant disservice to the public, by not having the courage to stand by the documented facts, and not doing the primary research on the myths and claims made by these industry insiders, which would have revealed the significant economic interests behind the vitriol and defamation to discredit Shiva’s work.
Setting the Record Straight
I am pleased to provide an extract of five key myths of the facts of email's origin, based on the misuses of the term "email".
Popular sites such as Wikipedia, unfortunately, continue to promulgate the myths of email’s history. Industry insiders dominate and monopolize such forums, and immediately remove even documented citations and facts, which expose and counter their false claims on email’s origin.
There is a simple way to understand the myths about email’s history by realizing a single and fundamental concept: Email is a System.
As an MIT professor, who led MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center for nearly half a decade, and served on the faculty in MIT’s Engineering Systems Division for over 17 years, my research has focused on systems and, specifically, developing new methodologies for architecting large-scale enterprise systems.
I spent nearly 40 years of my career helping some of the largest global companies in the world as well as military organizations understand the complexity of such large-scale systems in order to enhance their performance.
So, I know a bit about systems.
The classic definition of a system, by the eminent systems scientist Eberhardt Rechtin, is:
“A set of different elements so connected or related as to perform a unique function not performable by the elements alone.”
Email, by definition, as a system, is a set of different elements, so connected, as to be the direct electronic emulation of the interoffice mail system, as Robert Field has explained in The First Email System. The interoffice mail system consisted of the now-familiar components of email: Inbox, the Memo (“To:”, “From:”, “Date:”, “Subject:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”), Forwarding, Composing, Drafts, Edit, Reply, Delete, Priorities, Outbox, Folders, Archive, Attachments, Return Receipt, Carbon Copies (including Blind Carbon Copies), Sorting, Address Book, Groups, Bulk Distribution, etc.
The elements of email, which Shiva invented, functioned together to provide the foundations of complex interoffice, inter-departmental, inter-organizational communications. If you took away any one element or part of this system, such as the ability to attach other materials, Attachments, or the use of Folders or the ability to Forward or Prioritize, your ability to function and communicate with co-workers was greatly impaired in the office environment.
This is why email is a “system”, because you needed all elements to function cohesively together for office communications to take place.
When we understand that email is a system, we can realize that there is no “controversy” except the one fabricated by those insiders to confuse and convince us that email existed prior to 1978.
MYTH #1: “EMAIL” WAS CREATED ON THE ARPANET
This statement is a misuse of the term “email”, since the invention referenced in this statement is command-line protocols for the simple transfer of electronic text messages, not email – the electronic replication of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system.
ARPANET researchers, as history shows, were never interested in creating email. The famous RAND Report written by David Crocker, a leading ARPANET researcher, in December of 1977, is unequivocal as to the lack of intention of ARPANET researchers to create email, the inter-organizational mail system.
In December of 1977, Mr. Crocker wrote:
"At this time, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system [p.4]…. The fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users' needs. [p.7]”
— Crocker, David. Framework and Function of the "MS" Personal Message System. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1977.
Since the system is to be used for communication which is exemplified in older and heavily-exercised technology, it is assumed that users have an extensive conceptual model of the communication domain. It is further assumed that a system which performs in ways which deviate from that model will be viewed as "idiosyncratic" and impeding the efforts of the user. Problems occurring during this sort of interaction can be expected to be as irritating as having a pen which leaks or a typewriter with keys that jam. Therefore, a major design goal for MS is to provide an integrated set of necessary and sufficient functions which conform to the target user's cognitive model of a regular office-memo system. At this stage, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale inter-organization mail system....
The level of the MS project effort has also had a major effect upon the system's design. To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible with MS. In addition, the fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to users' needs. Consequently, important segments of a full message environment have received little or no attention and decisions have been made with the expectation that other Unix capabilities will be used to augment MS. For example, MS has fairly primitive data-base management (i.e., filing and cataloging) facilities and message folders have been implemented in a way which allows them to be modified by programs, such as text editors, which access them directly, rather than through the message system.
-- Framework and Functions of the "MS" Personal Message System: A Report prepared for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, by David H. Crocker
The ARPANET researchers were focused on creating methods for the simple exchange of text messages, in the lineage of the telegraph, and not on creating an electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system.
During the Civil War, the military, for example, relied on the telegraph as a core and strategic medium of communication for sending short text messages. The telegraph inspired continuing work by military research organizations. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for example, funded the ARPANET to develop methods for transport of simple text messages across computers during the 1960s and 1970s.
The purpose of the telegraph, unlike the interoffice mail system, was to transport text messages electronically across wires, using cryptic codes.
Telegraph operators sending and receiving text messages.
The interoffice system, unlike the telegraph, was a system used for transporting interoffice paper mail across offices, departments, organizations and buildings, using people, cars, trucks and pneumatic tubes that were prevalent across many offices.
Pneumatic tubes, a critical component of the interoffice mail system.
Just as the telegraph was not the interoffice mail system, the ARAPNET work was not email, but at best was a precursor to what we know today as Texting or Text Messaging. Therefore, statements that claim email was invented by the ARPANET are simply false and conflate the ARPANET work.
In fact, prior to 1978, the ARPANET referred to their work as “Text Messaging” or “Messaging” never as “email”. After the invention of email by Shiva in 1978, ARPANET alumni began to refer to their work as “email”.
This important distinction between the telegraph and the interoffice mail system helps us to understand the myth of the statement that “Email was created on the ARPANET”.
The military had little interest in sending interoffice memoranda on the battlefield in the 1970s - this is not what ARPANET was built for.
MYTH #2: RAY TOMLINSON INVENTED "EMAIL" AND SENT THE FIRST "EMAIL" MESSAGE
This statement is a misuse of the term “email” since Ray Tomlinson did not invent email - the electronic replication of of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. The invention referenced in such statements and attributed to Mr. Tomlinson is the simple exchange of text messages between computers.
In fact, what Mr. Tomlinson did was to simply modify a pre-existing program called SNDMSG, which he himself did not write. The minor modifications he made enabled the exchange of simple text messages across computers. The resulting SNDMSG however, was unusable by ordinary people, and required a set of highly technical computer codes that the sender had to type to transfer a message from one computer to another. Such cryptic codes were far too technical, and could not be used by a secretary or office worker.
As historical references demonstrate, SNDMSG, far from being email, was at best, a very rudimentary form of text messaging. As John Vittal, an early leading pioneer in electronic messaging researcher, observed:
“The very simple systems (SNDMSG, RD, and READMAIL) did not integrate the reading and creation functions, had different user interfaces, and did not provide sufficient functionality for simple message processing.”—Vittal, John. MSG: A Simple Message System. Cambridge, MA: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1981.
Moreover, Mr. Tomlinson, to his own admission said that what he created was a “no-brainer” and a minor contribution.
“I was making improvements to the local inter-user mail program called SNDMSG. The missing piece was that the experimental CPYNET protocol had no provision for appending to a file; it could just send and receive files. Adding the missing piece was a no-brainer—just a minor addition to the protocol.”—Tomlinson, Ray, retrieved April 7, 2012.
http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/fi ... frame.html
SNDMSG was less than a rudimentary form of text messging, and a far cry from email, the system created by Shiva which consisted of 50,000 lines of code that was the full-scale emulation of the entire interoffice mail system, by definition.
MYTH #3: THE “@” SYMBOL EQUALS THE INVENTION OF "EMAIL"
This is a misuse of the term “email” since it implies that the “@” symbol is equivalent to inventing email - the electronic replication of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system.
The “@” symbol is used in an email address to separate the user name from the domain name. The invention referenced in the above statement is the use of the “@” symbol to distinguish two computers when sending a text message. The “@” symbol is not a necessary component to distinguish two computers, in some cases “-at” was used, as verified by Tom Van Vleck:
“Because the ‘@’ was a line kill character in Multics, sending mail from Multics to other hosts used the control argument -at instead.”—Van Vleck, Tom. History of Electronic Mail, http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html, April 7, 2012.
In the first email system developed by Shiva, the symbol “.” was used to distinguish different computers. Equating the “@” symbol with the invention of email was a major branding and public relations effort of Raytheon/BBN. The “@” symbol is not email.
As M.A. Padlipsky, the eminent electronic messaging pioneer, an MIT graduate, a member of the ARPANET team, and a close contemporary of Mr. Tomlinson, observed of Raytheon/BNN’s long history of self-promotional activities:
“[T]he BBN guys - who always seemed to get to write the histories and hence always seemed to have claimed to have invented everything, anyway, perhaps because BBN was the only "for-profit" to furnish key members of the original Network Working Group.”—Padlipsky, M.A., ARPANET contributor and author of more than 20 RFC specifications), “And they argued all night….”,
http://archive.is/dx2TK
To conclude, the creation of the “@” symbol to distinguish computers, does not in any way equate to the invention of email.
MYTH #4: RFCS DEMONSTRATE "EMAIL" EXISTED PRIOR TO 1978
Requests for Comments (RFCs) were simply written documentations, not an email computer program, nor an email system. RFCs were literally meeting notes that recorded the meetings of electronic messaging researchers in the 1970s. As such, this is a flagrant misuse of the term “email”.
For example, sensationalist statements, such as the one by issued by Gizmodo in 2012 stating:
“[E]mail underpinnings were further cemented in 1977's RFC 733, a foundational document of what became the internet itself.”
are, at best misinformed, and completely lack understanding that email was the electronic interoffice mail system. Furthermore, email does not need the Internet to operate. Email systems initially ran on Wide Area Networks (WANs) and Local Area Networks (LANs), independent of the Internet and ARPANET. In fact, even today, one doesn’t need the Internet to run email.
Moreover, RFC 733 was a document to define an attempted standard that was never even fully accepted. The very term “RFC” means “Request for Comments”. It was a document created from meeting notes, and proposed ideas for message format and transmission, but said little about feature sets of individual electronic messaging or mail systems.
As the opening of RFC 733, it states:
“This specification is intended strictly as a definition of what is to be passed between hosts on the ARPANET. It is not intended to dictate either features which systems on the Network are expected to support, or user interfaces to message creating or reading programs.”— http://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc733.txt
Therefore, RFCs do not demonstrate that email existed prior to 1978. What RFCs demonstrate are that meetings and discussions were taking place on defining methods to exchange text messages, not the creation of email.
MYTH #5: CTSS, DEVELOPED IN 1960's, IS "EMAIL"
This is a misuse of the term “email” since the reference to CTSS MAIL (Computer Time Sharing System), the method referenced and attributed to MIT, was an early text messaging system, not a version of email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice mail system.
This invention, MAIL, allowed a CTSS user to transmit a file, written in a third-party editor, and encoded in binary-coded decimal format (BCD), to other CTSS users. The delivered message would be appended to the front of a file in the recipient’s directory that represented the aggregate of all received messages. This flat-file message storage placed strict constraints on the capacity of MAIL, and required users to traverse and review all messages one-by-one; search and sort mechanisms were not available.
The design choices in MAIL—lack of search and sort facilities, need for an external editor, dependence on CTSS-specific user IDs, and flat-file message storage—put strict constraints on the use and capacity of the command. It was well-suited to the low-volume transmission of informal (i.e. unformatted) messages, like text messaging of today.
The creator of MAIL, Tom Van Vleck, admitted this fact. Van Vleck stated:
“The proposed uses [of MAIL] were communication from ‘the system’ to users, informing them that files had been backed up, communication to the authors of commands with criticisms, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.” -http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html, retrieved April 18th, 2012
Those who promoted MAIL as "email," when the term "email" did not even exist in 1965, were attempting to redefine "email" as a command-driven program that transferred BCD-encoded text files, written in an external editor, among timesharing system users, to be reviewed serially in a flat-file.
One would be hard-pressed to draw a historical straight line from MAIL to today’s email systems. MAIL was not "email", but a text messaging command line system, at best. Historically, one can give credit to MAIL as a predecessor of today’s electronic bulletin board systems or modern blog postings.
CONCLUSION
Email is a system of interconnected parts that was designed with a clear aim to emulate another system: the interoffice paper-based mail system, a system of interlocking parts Inbox, Memo, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, etc. the elements of the email system used today by billions of people worldwide.
From our review of the five myths about email, one can understand developments such as the ARPANET efforts, early programs for sending and receiving messages, the “@” sign, technical specifications known as RFCs, and MAIL, which were claimed to be “email”, were not email - the system of interlocked parts for emulating the interoffice mail system.
Those developments, while significant to the advancement of the Internet, aimed to solve various problems, but were not intended to substitute for the interoffice paper mail system --- email.
Acknowledgements
For those interested in the unabridged version of this article, kindly refer to the False Claims section on http://www.inventorofemail.com which Dr. Sen Song and I organized and edited in 2012. Our compiling, editing and organizing the claims would not have been possible without the Herculean efforts of Devon Sparks and Lorraine Monetti, who discovered and annotated the documents, referenced therein.
About Deborah J. Nightingale
Deborah J. NightingaleDeborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D. is a world-renowned expert in enterprise systems transformation and architecting. For nearly 17 years, Dr. Nightingale served as a Professor of Practice of Engineering Systems, and Aerospace and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For the past nearly half a decade, she led the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. Today, she works with some of world’s leading organizations, bringing her strategic systems thinking approaches to transform their enterprises to achieve desired capabilities such as sustainability, flexibility or enhanced innovation and entrepreneurship.
Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Nightingale headed up Strategic Planning and Global Business Development for AlliedSignal Engines. While at AlliedSignal she also held a number of executive leadership positions in operations, engineering, and program management, participating in enterprise-wide operations from concept development to customer support. Prior to joining AlliedSignal, she worked at Wright-Patterson AFB where she served as program manager for computer simulation modeling research, design, and development in support of advanced man-machine design concepts.
Dr. Nightingale has a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Industrial and Systems Engineering. In addition, she holds MS and BS degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University and University of Dayton, respectively. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Past-President and Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Enterprise Transformation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Beyond the Lean Revolution: Achieving Successful and Sustainable Enterprise Transformation and Architecting the Future Enterprise (Spring 2015, MIT Press). Dr. Nightingale is a frequent keynote speaker and serves on a number of boards and national committees, where she interacts extensively with industry, government and academic leaders.
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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The Future of Email: Is Your Email Truly Free, Private and Secure?
by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D.
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
The Fifth Article in The History of Email Series
In 1978, I invented something that I named “email” at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, NJ. That something was the electronic version of the interoffice mail system.
For those 20 something’s the interoffice mail system was the “email” before email. The interoffice mail system consisted of all of the features and functions you see today in your email programs: Inbox, the Memo (To, From, Date, Subject, Cc, Bcc), Outbox, Address Book, Trash, Folders, Attachments, Return Receipt, and more. The big difference was this was a physical system used to process the memo and its attachments.
MIT Tech Talk (1981) highlights email invention.
Email Had No Future?
But, right from the beginning, I was told that email did not have a future. I remember one of the doctors at UMDNJ telling me, “What’s wrong with paper memos? They are so easy to send. This email thing isn’t going to go anywhere.” He was in his late 50’s and I was just this 14-year-old kid. What did I know?
So, I listened I knew there were others like him: the secretaries, staff and students at UMDNJ, who probably had similar concerns. I wanted to find what I would have to do, so they would start using email.
Three things became clear.
First, I had to give them all the features of the paper-based interoffice mail system they were accustomed to: “Inbox”, “Outbox”, “Folders”, “the Memo”, “Carbon Copies”, “Address Book”, “Attachments”, “Groups”, “Trash”, etc. as well as the functions they did such as “Compose”, “Edit”, “Sort”, “Return Receipt”, “Prioritize”, etc. --- all in all about a hundred different features and functions.
Second, I had better make email really easy-to-use. This meant all those features had to delivered through an easy-to-use user interface. At that time there was no mouse, just a keyboard. An easy-to-use interface meant simple menus, no need to type in commands or codes, ease of navigation, ability to quickly scan their incoming mail, etc.
Third, the system had to be reliable. It had to work, all the time. They trusted their paper-mail system, “neither sleet nor snow….”
Building these three elements became my passion. My work seemed to pay off. The UMDNJ community began to adopt email, the electronic interoffice mail system, and the name “email” began to the spread across UMDNJ and beyond. In 1982, I received the first Copyright for Email from the US Government.
The rest became history.
I remember when I first came to MIT, The Tech, MIT’s official newspaper, had a front page article, mentioning the achievements of three of the 1,041 incoming students. The invention of email was one of the three achievements that were highlighted.
The “Nine Lives” of Email
During 1982 to 1993, email’s usage grew primarily in the business office environment, because that it where it originated. During this time, the number of email users was on the order of hundreds of thousands to several million users.
But, even during this growth, experts predicted email’s death.
They said that the FAX would destroy email. While, other said the Telegram was email’s killer. Neither of these predictions came true; in fact, quite the opposite took place. Today, the Telegram has died completely and the FAX is used minimally.
In 1993, the World Wide Web (WWW) was released. The WWW, with its easy-to-use graphical user interface, made the Internet accessible to masses of worldwide consumers. The WWW transformed email’s user base from office workers to ordinary consumers.
Web-based email programs such as HotMail, Yahoo and Gmail emerged. These programs inspired an explosive growth in email’s adoption. After 1993, email users jumped to hundreds of millions of users.
But, the experts continued their mantra “email is dead”.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, a new breed of “experts” began to point to Instant Messaging (IM), Chat, and On-line Discussion Boards, as the next killers of email.
In spite of such predictions, email users climbed to the billions. The experts were relentless, and continued their erroneous predictions.
In the mid-2000s and 2010s, other obituary statements for email were issued stating that Texting on smart phones; and social media, such as FaceBook and Twitter, were going to kill email.
All of them have proved wrong. The “experts” simply do not understand the fundamentals of email, and keep confusing email with other media: chat, on-line bulletin boards, texting, instant messaging, blogs, etc. Every time a new media comes along, their eulogies for email begin.
But, when one truly looks at the origin of email: the interoffice mail system, which was the engine of communications for businesses, it becomes clear, that as long businesses, big and small, are around, email will be here for a long, long time.
Okay, If Email Is Here to Stay, What Should We Really Be Concerned About?
A more legitimate discussion on email, therefore, is not whether it is going to be here or not, but this: IS EMAIL GOING TO BE TRULY FREE?
By free, I do not mean will it be free from a cost standpoint. I mean, will our freedoms such as security and privacy, be protected?
Billions of email messages are transacted each day, and the numbers are growing exponentially. However, nearly all of our email is not private. Private companies, and their employees can access your email, and you may never know it.
When you signed up that "free" email service, for example, you implicitly traded your rights to privacy for that free service. At any point, your free email service provider can shut you down or sell you out, and there goes our “free-dom”.
Consider the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt. At one point, when the revolutionary movement began to escalate, the Mubarak government was able to shut down all electronic communications by collaborating with Vodafone, a private company whose only accountability was to its shareholders.
In the United States, the Declaration of Independence proclaims that all citizens are free and that each has the right and duty to change the government if it no longer services the broader needs:
The Founding Fathers of the United States established various mechanisms to ensure the spirit of the Declaration of Independence could be exercised through a viable, dynamic and revolutionary democracy. To enable such freedom, they created institutions to ensure that each citizen could transact communications, privately, without even government intervention and tampering.
The United States Postal Service (USPS), for example, was one such mechanism.
The USPS was created during the birth of America to ensure such democratic rights. In particular, the USPS made it possible for any citizen to send a piece of mail to another, for an affordable cost, and such mail was secured by laws, so that mail would not be opened or violated. For this purpose, the USPS set up an internal policing mechanism, the USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG is the “police force” which regularly audits postal facilities and makes it a Federal crime if anyone, including a government worker, tampers with a citizen’s mail.
Over the years, the USPS has been under attack. Bit by bit, parts of the USPS have been gutted, the best parts of it privatized, and what now remains are its spoils. And, as the USPS has been attacked and destroyed, the volume of email has grown explosively, overtaking postal mail starting in 1997.
Consumers, during this growth, began using largely free email services to conduct their email activity. These free email services present a long legal document, which few read, that details the “privacy policy” of usage of those email services. And, if you do take the time to read these “privacy” policies, you will realize one simple thing: YOU DO NOT OWN YOUR EMAIL. YOU DO NOT HAVE PRIVACY!
When you sent postal mail via the USPS, it was YOUR mail. But when you send email via these free services it is NOT YOUR email.
Email Must Become A Public Utility Protected By Law
When email over took postal mail volume in 1997, the USPS should have embraced email and provided the same infrastructure of postal mail services in electronic form, and renewed itself and its deteriorating situation.
In fact, in 1997, I had urged the USPS senior management to embrace email and advised them to offer email as a public utility, sponsored by the USPS, for citizens at some nominal cost. However, the management at USPS did not have the vision or the courage to do that. Their response, at the time, was, “We are a $50 billion dollar enterprise with more employees than WalMart. Why do we need to get into this email business?”
That reminded me of that doctor at UMDNJ who also didn’t see a need for email.
The USPS OIG was designed to ensure that our mail would not be tampered. If the USPS provided email as a public utility, those mail tampering laws would likely migrate to email tampering. This would mean that if anyone, including the government or its employees, tampered with our email, we would have rights, through the USPS OIG, to prosecute and seek enforcement, including the right to escalate to the Court systems
Right now, when it comes to email, private enterprises control email transactions. As an entrepreneur, I am not against private enterprise; however, the fact that consumers have no alternative to protect and enforce their email security and privacy is disturbing.
As we work in the digital world, our freedom through email communications, when we use those “free” services, simply do not exist.
Making Email Truly Free
So, I stand by my 1997 recommendations to the USPS: they must embrace email and offer email as a public utility, like the government provides the highway and water systems. Moreover, it provides them a new source of revenue and a way to keep an important democratic institution alive and not go bankrupt, their current trajectory.
I am sure many Americans will be willing to pay some nominal fee to know that their email is not being read, is totally secure, and cannot be shut down, like Vodafone did to those fighting for their freedom in Tahrir Square.
In 1978, there was never any intent on my part to make money or seek fame from inventing email. For me, the incredible feeling of accomplishment in not just inventing email, but seeing its impact on the daily lives of actual workers at UMDNJ, was something beyond description.
As the inventor of email, my appeal is for citizens, across the world, to boldly proclaim their rights to free and open communication and demand that their public institutions, created to protect our rights and access to a democratic systems of communication, get their priorities clear: deliver email that is truly FREE.
About Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D.
Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.DDr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., the Inventor of Email, holds four degrees from MIT, is a Fulbright Scholar, Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Awards Winner, Lemelson-MIT Finalist, and the First Outstanding Scientist/Technologist of Indian Origin. He is the founder of Innovation Corps, a 501 (c) (3) non-profit initiative dedicated to identifying, sponsoring and mentoring, youth between he ages of 14-18, to innovate and convert ideas to tangible ventures. Dr. Ayyadurai has successfully started and grown seven start-up ventures across the fields of media, information technology and medicine.
He serves as the Managing Director of General Interactive, an innovation incubator, and is currently the Chairman & CEO of CytoSolve, Inc., a company that has developed a revolutionary platform for the in silico development of multi-combination therapeutics. In addition, he has founded Systems Health, an educational company that provides an integrative educational program for eastern and western systems of medicine.
As a systems scientist and systems biology, he continues to publish in scholarly peer-reviewed journals and is a sought-after public speaker on innovation, systems and medicine. His most recent book The Email Revolution has received wide acclaim, and he is in the midst of completing his next book Systems Health: The Future of Medicine.
by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D.
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The Fifth Article in The History of Email Series
In 1978, I invented something that I named “email” at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, NJ. That something was the electronic version of the interoffice mail system.
For those 20 something’s the interoffice mail system was the “email” before email. The interoffice mail system consisted of all of the features and functions you see today in your email programs: Inbox, the Memo (To, From, Date, Subject, Cc, Bcc), Outbox, Address Book, Trash, Folders, Attachments, Return Receipt, and more. The big difference was this was a physical system used to process the memo and its attachments.
MIT Tech Talk (1981) highlights email invention.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
TECHTALK
September 2, 1981
Volume 26, Number 5
The Class of 1985 arrives to meet the Institute
by Joanne Miller
Staff Writer
Some 1,040 strong, the Class of 1985 arrived at MIT last week to hear a welcoming greeting and some words of advice from President Paul E. Gray at the Freshman Picnic in Killian Court.
"It is a happy moment as the cycle of the year begins," he said to the assembled freshmen, their advisors and associate advisors. He noted that it was the first time so many of the class would be together in one place, something that won't happen again until they gather there nearly four years hence to receive their degrees.
He told the freshmen not to overcommit themselves in narrow academic pursuits, to take initiative in creating individual opportunities for themselves and not to lose sleep over academic survival.
Who are these freshmen? Well, for one thing, 258 -- just about 25 percent -- of them are freshwomen, the largest number ever. The freshmen come from 45 states -- Alaska, Idaho, Nevada, Iowa and South Dakota are unrepresented this year -- and 26 foreign countries.
They were selected from 5,458 applicants, also the largest number ever. Ninety per cent of them were in the top tenth of their high school classes, in schools that rank, and more than half of them enter with some college credit already behind them.
They are accomplished in a variety of other ways as well. One designed an electronic mail system now being used at the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry; another designed and built solar panels now in use at his high school; a third designed a nutrition program for high school wrestlers, and a fourth owns a gasohol plant.
There are, as usual, many musical talents, including a young woman who has played first violin with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a freshman who has sung with no fewer than five school and community choirs, one who is a dancer and choreographer for Chinese opera, and one who is a leader of a harmonica band.
Among their individual pursuits they list: toymaking, marquetry, rare bird breeding, filmmaking, fly-tying and puppetry. There is also a sheep breeder, a horse trainer and a pilot with the Civil Air Patrol.
They have also taken an active part in community service. One organized a cancer walkathon that raised $32,000; another built a haunted house for an annual community project. One is a volunteer firefighter; another is an amateur magician who performed at an international children's festival.
Sports play an important part in many of their lives. One freshwoman organized a women's soccer team. Two are skaters of note, one a silver medallist in US Figure Skating Association competition and one who played for the Canadian National Hockey Team. There is a freshman who has coached a women's football team and a freshwoman who has managed a wrestling team.
In sum, the Class of 1985, like those that preceded it, arrives with a wealth of talents and abilities that will contribute much to the richness of our community.
Email Had No Future?
But, right from the beginning, I was told that email did not have a future. I remember one of the doctors at UMDNJ telling me, “What’s wrong with paper memos? They are so easy to send. This email thing isn’t going to go anywhere.” He was in his late 50’s and I was just this 14-year-old kid. What did I know?
So, I listened I knew there were others like him: the secretaries, staff and students at UMDNJ, who probably had similar concerns. I wanted to find what I would have to do, so they would start using email.
Three things became clear.
First, I had to give them all the features of the paper-based interoffice mail system they were accustomed to: “Inbox”, “Outbox”, “Folders”, “the Memo”, “Carbon Copies”, “Address Book”, “Attachments”, “Groups”, “Trash”, etc. as well as the functions they did such as “Compose”, “Edit”, “Sort”, “Return Receipt”, “Prioritize”, etc. --- all in all about a hundred different features and functions.
Second, I had better make email really easy-to-use. This meant all those features had to delivered through an easy-to-use user interface. At that time there was no mouse, just a keyboard. An easy-to-use interface meant simple menus, no need to type in commands or codes, ease of navigation, ability to quickly scan their incoming mail, etc.
Third, the system had to be reliable. It had to work, all the time. They trusted their paper-mail system, “neither sleet nor snow….”
Building these three elements became my passion. My work seemed to pay off. The UMDNJ community began to adopt email, the electronic interoffice mail system, and the name “email” began to the spread across UMDNJ and beyond. In 1982, I received the first Copyright for Email from the US Government.
The rest became history.
I remember when I first came to MIT, The Tech, MIT’s official newspaper, had a front page article, mentioning the achievements of three of the 1,041 incoming students. The invention of email was one of the three achievements that were highlighted.
The “Nine Lives” of Email
During 1982 to 1993, email’s usage grew primarily in the business office environment, because that it where it originated. During this time, the number of email users was on the order of hundreds of thousands to several million users.
But, even during this growth, experts predicted email’s death.
They said that the FAX would destroy email. While, other said the Telegram was email’s killer. Neither of these predictions came true; in fact, quite the opposite took place. Today, the Telegram has died completely and the FAX is used minimally.
In 1993, the World Wide Web (WWW) was released. The WWW, with its easy-to-use graphical user interface, made the Internet accessible to masses of worldwide consumers. The WWW transformed email’s user base from office workers to ordinary consumers.
Web-based email programs such as HotMail, Yahoo and Gmail emerged. These programs inspired an explosive growth in email’s adoption. After 1993, email users jumped to hundreds of millions of users.
But, the experts continued their mantra “email is dead”.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, a new breed of “experts” began to point to Instant Messaging (IM), Chat, and On-line Discussion Boards, as the next killers of email.
In spite of such predictions, email users climbed to the billions. The experts were relentless, and continued their erroneous predictions.
In the mid-2000s and 2010s, other obituary statements for email were issued stating that Texting on smart phones; and social media, such as FaceBook and Twitter, were going to kill email.
All of them have proved wrong. The “experts” simply do not understand the fundamentals of email, and keep confusing email with other media: chat, on-line bulletin boards, texting, instant messaging, blogs, etc. Every time a new media comes along, their eulogies for email begin.
But, when one truly looks at the origin of email: the interoffice mail system, which was the engine of communications for businesses, it becomes clear, that as long businesses, big and small, are around, email will be here for a long, long time.
Okay, If Email Is Here to Stay, What Should We Really Be Concerned About?
A more legitimate discussion on email, therefore, is not whether it is going to be here or not, but this: IS EMAIL GOING TO BE TRULY FREE?
By free, I do not mean will it be free from a cost standpoint. I mean, will our freedoms such as security and privacy, be protected?
Billions of email messages are transacted each day, and the numbers are growing exponentially. However, nearly all of our email is not private. Private companies, and their employees can access your email, and you may never know it.
When you signed up that "free" email service, for example, you implicitly traded your rights to privacy for that free service. At any point, your free email service provider can shut you down or sell you out, and there goes our “free-dom”.
Consider the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt. At one point, when the revolutionary movement began to escalate, the Mubarak government was able to shut down all electronic communications by collaborating with Vodafone, a private company whose only accountability was to its shareholders.
In the United States, the Declaration of Independence proclaims that all citizens are free and that each has the right and duty to change the government if it no longer services the broader needs:
“That to secure these rights [of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness] Governments are instituted among men … that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it ….”
The Founding Fathers of the United States established various mechanisms to ensure the spirit of the Declaration of Independence could be exercised through a viable, dynamic and revolutionary democracy. To enable such freedom, they created institutions to ensure that each citizen could transact communications, privately, without even government intervention and tampering.
The United States Postal Service (USPS), for example, was one such mechanism.
The USPS was created during the birth of America to ensure such democratic rights. In particular, the USPS made it possible for any citizen to send a piece of mail to another, for an affordable cost, and such mail was secured by laws, so that mail would not be opened or violated. For this purpose, the USPS set up an internal policing mechanism, the USPS Office of Inspector General (OIG). The OIG is the “police force” which regularly audits postal facilities and makes it a Federal crime if anyone, including a government worker, tampers with a citizen’s mail.
Over the years, the USPS has been under attack. Bit by bit, parts of the USPS have been gutted, the best parts of it privatized, and what now remains are its spoils. And, as the USPS has been attacked and destroyed, the volume of email has grown explosively, overtaking postal mail starting in 1997.
Consumers, during this growth, began using largely free email services to conduct their email activity. These free email services present a long legal document, which few read, that details the “privacy policy” of usage of those email services. And, if you do take the time to read these “privacy” policies, you will realize one simple thing: YOU DO NOT OWN YOUR EMAIL. YOU DO NOT HAVE PRIVACY!
When you sent postal mail via the USPS, it was YOUR mail. But when you send email via these free services it is NOT YOUR email.
Email Must Become A Public Utility Protected By Law
When email over took postal mail volume in 1997, the USPS should have embraced email and provided the same infrastructure of postal mail services in electronic form, and renewed itself and its deteriorating situation.
In fact, in 1997, I had urged the USPS senior management to embrace email and advised them to offer email as a public utility, sponsored by the USPS, for citizens at some nominal cost. However, the management at USPS did not have the vision or the courage to do that. Their response, at the time, was, “We are a $50 billion dollar enterprise with more employees than WalMart. Why do we need to get into this email business?”
That reminded me of that doctor at UMDNJ who also didn’t see a need for email.
The USPS OIG was designed to ensure that our mail would not be tampered. If the USPS provided email as a public utility, those mail tampering laws would likely migrate to email tampering. This would mean that if anyone, including the government or its employees, tampered with our email, we would have rights, through the USPS OIG, to prosecute and seek enforcement, including the right to escalate to the Court systems
Right now, when it comes to email, private enterprises control email transactions. As an entrepreneur, I am not against private enterprise; however, the fact that consumers have no alternative to protect and enforce their email security and privacy is disturbing.
As we work in the digital world, our freedom through email communications, when we use those “free” services, simply do not exist.
Making Email Truly Free
So, I stand by my 1997 recommendations to the USPS: they must embrace email and offer email as a public utility, like the government provides the highway and water systems. Moreover, it provides them a new source of revenue and a way to keep an important democratic institution alive and not go bankrupt, their current trajectory.
I am sure many Americans will be willing to pay some nominal fee to know that their email is not being read, is totally secure, and cannot be shut down, like Vodafone did to those fighting for their freedom in Tahrir Square.
In 1978, there was never any intent on my part to make money or seek fame from inventing email. For me, the incredible feeling of accomplishment in not just inventing email, but seeing its impact on the daily lives of actual workers at UMDNJ, was something beyond description.
As the inventor of email, my appeal is for citizens, across the world, to boldly proclaim their rights to free and open communication and demand that their public institutions, created to protect our rights and access to a democratic systems of communication, get their priorities clear: deliver email that is truly FREE.
About Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D.
Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.DDr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D., the Inventor of Email, holds four degrees from MIT, is a Fulbright Scholar, Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Awards Winner, Lemelson-MIT Finalist, and the First Outstanding Scientist/Technologist of Indian Origin. He is the founder of Innovation Corps, a 501 (c) (3) non-profit initiative dedicated to identifying, sponsoring and mentoring, youth between he ages of 14-18, to innovate and convert ideas to tangible ventures. Dr. Ayyadurai has successfully started and grown seven start-up ventures across the fields of media, information technology and medicine.
He serves as the Managing Director of General Interactive, an innovation incubator, and is currently the Chairman & CEO of CytoSolve, Inc., a company that has developed a revolutionary platform for the in silico development of multi-combination therapeutics. In addition, he has founded Systems Health, an educational company that provides an integrative educational program for eastern and western systems of medicine.
As a systems scientist and systems biology, he continues to publish in scholarly peer-reviewed journals and is a sought-after public speaker on innovation, systems and medicine. His most recent book The Email Revolution has received wide acclaim, and he is in the midst of completing his next book Systems Health: The Future of Medicine.
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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Attempts To Hijack The History Of Email
by Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D., Deborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D. and Sen Song, Ph.D.
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
Introduction
Three facts are undeniable concerning the history of email:
1. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is the inventor of email.
2. Raytheon/BBN and the ARPANET community are NOT the inventors of email.
3. Raytheon/BBN have significant economic interest in the myth that they invented email.
When these simple facts with clear documentation are shared with major media houses such as the Washington Post and the Huffington Post, a vocal minority blitzkriegs journalists using a cabal of “historians”, “scholars” and “experts”, who unleash confusion and disinformation, without revealing their conflict of interest and loyalty to Raytheon/BBN, which has billions to lose if Raytheon/BBN’s false brand as inventors of email is exposed.
Raytheon/BBN’s entire multi-billion dollar brand, (see http://www.bbn.com), that brandishes ‘@’ logo juxtaposed with “innovation”, using their mascot Ray Tomlinson as the “inventor of email ”, is built on lies and myths that they “invented email”. This branding provides them a competitive edge to win lucrative cyber-security contracts from their competitors.
On September 3, 2014, Dr. Deborah J. Nightingale, one the world's leading enterprise systems scientist, who recently retired her tenure of 17 years at MIT, shared the article “The Five Myths About Email’s History and the ‘Controversy’ Fabricated by Industry Insiders to Hijack the Invention of Email” on the Huffington Post History of Email Series. In response to the facts, a irrational vocal minority unleashed hell on Dr. Nightingale, Dr. Ayyadurai and the Huffington Post.
Her series was the fourth in a History of Email Series that included an article by Larry Weber on The Boy Who Invented Email, Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, Phd. on The Invention of Email, and Mr. Robert Field on The First Email System. Dr. Ayyadurai's article The Future of Email, would have been the fifth article in the series.
I. A Systematic Method of Attack to Protect a False History of Email
What is also undeniably clear is that this vocal minority, each time any major media house carries the facts about the invention of email, immediately responds with a systematic method of attacks that includes a process that escalates step-by-step. For example, if defamation and character assassination fail (Step 2), they advance to the next step, of simply throwing disinformation and tantrums at the media houses (Step 3). Based on the level of resources, time and integrity of each media house to validate the facts, and not being swayed by their tantrums, their success is determined.
Step 1 - Deny that the inventor of email is Dr. Ayyadurai;
Step 2 – Defame and character assassinate Dr. Ayyadurai or any of his supporters as a “fraud”, “imposter”, “liar”, “curry-stained Indian,” and other expletives;
Step 3 – Attack the media house, journalists, editors, etc., which publish articles sharing the facts e.g. Washington Post, Huffington Post.
Step 4 - Confuse and misinform journalists by: (1) misusing the term “email” (that was originally defined by Dr. Ayyadurai in 1978 to refer to his invention “email”, that was the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system: Inbox, Outbox, etc. that is the email we experience in modern email programs) to refer to earlier work in text messaging by Raytheon/BBN and ARPANET as email, which were clearly not email; (2) lying by equating “electronic messaging” with “email”, so as to discredit Dr. Ayyadurai by stating that Dr. Ayyadurai is claiming to have invented “electronic messaging”, which did exist before 1978.
Step 5 – Distract and dismiss attention of the bare facts by dismissing them as “out of context”, “meaningless”, etc.
Step 6 – Lie by stating that no one can “invent email”.
Step 7 – “Peer Pressure” the media house and journalists, using a cabal of “historians”, “scholars”, “experts” with ties to Raytheon/BBN, by stating that the media house are “idiots”, “stupid”, “know nothing about technology”, and force them to pull down the articles and facts from the web site.
As of today, two major media houses have become victims to this systematic method of attacks, pressure and intimidation: The Washington Post and the Huffington Post. The level of vitriol and abuse against Dr. Ayyadurai and his colleagues are itself a reflection of how those in power react, when their hegemony over false narratives are threatened.
The facts on this situation, however, are “black and white.”
II. Email was thought “impossible” before 1978
The interoffice, inter-organizational mail system was a complex system of interlocking parts that were used by secretaries, office workers, and other ordinary people to process paper mail communications.
In 1978, such ordinary people did not interact with computers. Those who interacted with computers were highly trained technical personnel: computer systems operators, systems analysts, computer programmers, engineers and scientists, who used computers for performing complex scientific and data processing tasks.
The concept of end users, ordinary people interacting with computers, using software applications, as we do today, such as email, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, etc. was inconceivable at that time. In 1978, there were no personal computers (PCs), laptops, iPads and smart phones. Few, if any ordinary people like secretaries, office workers, doctors, dentists and students, for example, had ever touched a computer keyboard or interacted with a computer terminal or ever even “logged in” to use an end user software application.
This is precisely why leading researchers in the ARPAnet research community, highly trained computer engineers and scientists, who were focused on developing rudimentary methods for the simple transfer of electronic messages reliably, thought it inconceivable to build an entire electronic system, for such an untrained, computer illiterate base of end users, to manage the myriad of functions of an inter-organizational mail system.
In the RAND Report, published on December 1977, for example, its author, Mr. David Crocker, a leading member of the ARPAnet community, conveyed the impossibility of creating such a system for such diverse end users, in the Report’s Introductory section, which defined the limits and scope of their then-current work in electronic messaging:
The historical context in which such statements were expressed is important to understand. They reveal two important insights.
First, ARPAnet researchers were highly trained technical personnel. They were working on technologies to support a homogenous group of “users,” technical people who knew how to program and were facile with the computer. They were not developing software applications for “users of differing expertise,” the secretary or officer worker. The computer, playing a role in the day-to-day life of such end users, was a primordial concept to these ARPAnet researchers.
Second, the ARPAnet researchers were working on creating rudimentary methods to reliably transfer electronic messages from point to point, across multiple nodes of potential failure. Transferring short messages reliably such as: “Charlie take that hill” or “Bomb location 32 degrees North” for battlefield communications was their inspiration. ARPAnet researchers were not being paid to emulate a system for managing interoffice, inter-organizational communications.
The concept of creating the system of interlocking parts to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system – email, was simply beyond their scope of work, or, as they had deemed, “impossible.” In addition to the RAND Report, the False Claims section of http://www.inventorofemail.com, documents research across hundreds of other primary sources, to demonstrate that the work of ARPAnet researchers and others, prior to 1978, was focused on defining and creating simple methods for the exchange of text messages, which were certainly not email.
III. Why Dr. Ayyadurai is the Inventor of Email
Here are technical facts on why Dr. Ayyadurai is the inventor of email:
There are three clear legal reasons, as documented by fact, why Shiva is the inventor of email:
First, by the act of Shiva creating email, in 1978, he became “the inventor of email”.
Second, in addition to this first point of fact, Shiva also received official recognition by the U.S. government as the inventor of email based on the following facts:
Third, during 1980 to 1982, evidence of Shiva’s invention of email appears in three other documents:
Then on the technical facts alone, Ayyadurai is the inventor of email. However, beyond this, he also received legal and formal recognition by the US government’s then existing laws for software invention. And beyond these two important points, even prior to the Smithsonian news, he received acknowledgement for his invention, as evidenced in at least three (3) other documents, before 2012.
IV. Creation of InventorOfEmail.Com
Shortly after the vitriol, allegations and racism, unleashed by those loyal to Raytheon/BBN, and attacks on the Washington Post in February of 2012, we established the site http://www.inventorofemail.com to set the record straight, beyond the disinformation for Mr. Crocker, SIGCIS, and the like. Many, including the authors of this article, as listed on http://www.inventorofemail.com/site-con ... graphy.asp contributed to that web site by providing content, research, edits, as well as feedback on the site design.
V. The Summary of Attacks on the Washington Post
On February 16, 2012, nearly 33 years after the invention of email, computer code, papers and other artifacts documenting the invention of email were acquired into the Smithsonian. The same day the Washington Post published an article “V.A. Shiva Honored as the Inventor of Email.” This article led to attacks on Dr. Ayyadurai and the Washington Post. Dr. Ayyadurai was called a “Fraud”, “Imposter”, “Dick”, “Asshole”, “Curry-Stained Indian Who Should be Hung and Beaten”, and other deplorable comments. The Washington Post’s reporter and editors were attacked for publishing the article.
A vocal minority led by David Crocker and SIGCIS historians attacked Dr. Ayyadurai and the Washington Post, by confusing the terms “electronic messaging” with “email”, and presented nearly 12 false claims that email was invented before 1978. The Washington Post was unable to respond to these attacks. In the midst of the melee, they simply acquiesced to the barrage of confusion by a “mea culpa” and “correction”.
We, the authors of this release, and others, did respond with the facts on the False Claims Section on the InventorOfEmail.Com, which dissected and demonstrated the myths and lies, of each of the 12 claims made, that included five of them, which were the most ubiquitous. Dr. Nightingale and Dr. Song were the major contributors of this content.
However, during this melee, where Shiva was simply attacked and abused, the reach of tabloids such as Gizmodo, the Blaze, the Verge, and others, suffocated the facts from real investigative journalists ever seeing these facts. Most “journalists” simply cut and pasted the lies and nonsense promulgated by Mr. Crocker, SIGCIS, and from these tabloids, in subsequent articles.
In late 2013, Dr. Ayyadurai, completed a book The Email Revolution, and attempted to get the facts to the general public, which shared the content we had developed, as well as content from the InventorOfEmail.Com site.
Detractors, once again, responded to his book, by going on to Amazon’s website and vandalizing the site and attacking Dr. Ayyadurai, with comments such as fraud, liar and imposter.
VI. The Summary of Attacks on the Huffington Post
Nearly two (2) years had passed since the abusive attacks on the Washington Post; however, we were consistently committed to getting the facts of email’s history to the general public.
In late 2013, Dr. Nightingale, then Director of MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC), sponsored a special talk by Dr. Ayyadurai to share the facts about email’s invention as well as the larger questions of innovation. Dr. Ayyadurai was a Visiting Researcher at MIT, at the time of this talk.
To commemorate the Anniversary of Email on August 30, 2014, the Huffington Post was given the opportunity to share a History of Email Series, along with a video interview with Dr. Ayyadurai and his 82-Year-Old father Vellayappa Ayyadurai. Larry Weber, Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field, Deborah J. Nightingale, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, contributors to the InventorOfEmail.Com site, reviewed and authored five articles as a part of the Series, which were submitted for review, ahead of time, to the Huffington Post.
As each article came out, on a pre-determined schedule this vocal minority attacked the Huffington Post, Dr. Ayyadurai, and the authors of the article, directly on the site, and through rags such as TechDirt. These attacks included calling Dr. Ayyadurai a fraud, liar and imposter. When Dr. Nightingale’s article, the fourth in the series, entitled “The Five Myths About Email’s History and the ‘Controversy’ Fabricated by Industry Insiders to Hijack the Invention of Email” which focused on Five Myths, an extract of the initial twelve False Claims, was published, the cabal of “historians” and industry insiders unleashed fury on the Huffington Post and on Dr. Nightingale.
VII. Attacks on Wikipedia Article on Shiva Ayyadurai
A reactionary group also took to Wikipedia, and starting in September of 2012, destroyed and defamed Dr. Ayyadurai’s page reducing his page to someone “notable” for just causing a controversy on email. One experienced Wikipedia editor, shared in an email with Dr. Ayyadurai’s assistant the following:
It is clear nearly to any rational individual that there is an organized group of irrational individuals dedicated to character assassinating Dr. Ayyadurai, not only to deny his rightful distinction as the inventor of email, but also to destroy and defame his entire career as a scientist and inventor.
Why else has his entire Wikipedia page, in spite of the facts, been deleted of all his accomplishments?
It is time a serious investigation be conducted on those who claim to be “scholars” and “historians” to illuminate all of us to their conflict of interest with Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar corporation, who has the most to lose in this battle, that they have unleashed using their loyal supporters.
About Leslie P. Michelson
Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D. is the Director of High Performance and Research Computing Division, Rutgers Medical School (RMS). In 1975, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), now a part of RMS, recruited Dr. Michelson, a trained theoretical physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratories. His group at RMS develops solutions in the life sciences for research endeavors with demanding computational requirements. In the late 1970’s Michelson’s organization provided the challenge, resources and mentorship that led to the development of the first electronic interoffice memorandum postal system by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. Throughout his career Michelson has been active in the support of the use of networking technologies to advance research and education interests in the State of New Jersey. He was a founder and served as the third president of the New Jersey Intercampus Network, the predecessor of the State’s Higher Education and Research Network, NJEDge.Net.
About Deborah J. Nightingale
Deborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D. is a world-renowned expert in enterprise systems transformation and architecting. For nearly 17 years, Dr. Nightingale served as a Professor of Practice of Engineering Systems, and Aerospace and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For the past nearly half a decade, she led the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. Today, she works with some of world’s leading organizations, bringing her strategic systems thinking approaches to transform their enterprises to achieve desired capabilities such as sustainability, flexibility or enhanced innovation and entrepreneurship.
Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Nightingale headed up Strategic Planning and Global Business Development for AlliedSignal Engines. While at AlliedSignal she also held a number of executive leadership positions in operations, engineering, and program management, participating in enterprise-wide operations from concept development to customer support. Prior to joining AlliedSignal, she worked at Wright-Patterson AFB where she served as program manager for computer simulation modeling research, design, and development in support of advanced man-machine design concepts.
Dr. Nightingale has a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Industrial and Systems Engineering. In addition, she holds MS and BS degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University and University of Dayton, respectively. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Past-President and Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Enterprise Transformation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Beyond the Lean Revolution: Achieving Successful and Sustainable Enterprise Transformation and Architecting the Future Enterprise(Spring 2015, MIT Press). Dr. Nightingale is a frequent keynote speaker and serves on a number of boards and national committees, where she interacts extensively with industry, government and academic leaders.
About Sen Song
Sen Song, Ph.D. is pioneer in computational systems and neuroscience, focusing on interdisciplinary research between neuroscience, computer science and artificial intelligence. He is currently a principal investigator in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Brain-like Computation at Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from Brandeis University in 2002. He received postdoctoral training at MIT and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory before being recruited by Tsinghua University in 2010. He is also experienced in deep learning algorithms and systems biology. During his postdoctoral training at MIT, he used deep learning algorithm in reconstructing brain connectome. He also has extensive industrial experience, being the co-founder of Ikena.com in 1998, which was later acquired by net2phone, developing online collaborative browsing and experience sharing software. From 2001-2002, he was a computational biologist at GPC Biotech, researching genome analyzing algorithms and architecting big-data analysis systems. In 2012, Dr. Song was a key researcher, while at MIT, in uncovering and exposing the false claims of computer “historians” who asserted that email was invented before 1978. During 2012-2013, he was appointed a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, developing neural network algorithms for image segmentation and recognition.
by Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D., Deborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D. and Sen Song, Ph.D.
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Introduction
Three facts are undeniable concerning the history of email:
1. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai is the inventor of email.
2. Raytheon/BBN and the ARPANET community are NOT the inventors of email.
3. Raytheon/BBN have significant economic interest in the myth that they invented email.
When these simple facts with clear documentation are shared with major media houses such as the Washington Post and the Huffington Post, a vocal minority blitzkriegs journalists using a cabal of “historians”, “scholars” and “experts”, who unleash confusion and disinformation, without revealing their conflict of interest and loyalty to Raytheon/BBN, which has billions to lose if Raytheon/BBN’s false brand as inventors of email is exposed.
Raytheon/BBN’s entire multi-billion dollar brand, (see http://www.bbn.com), that brandishes ‘@’ logo juxtaposed with “innovation”, using their mascot Ray Tomlinson as the “inventor of email ”, is built on lies and myths that they “invented email”. This branding provides them a competitive edge to win lucrative cyber-security contracts from their competitors.
On September 3, 2014, Dr. Deborah J. Nightingale, one the world's leading enterprise systems scientist, who recently retired her tenure of 17 years at MIT, shared the article “The Five Myths About Email’s History and the ‘Controversy’ Fabricated by Industry Insiders to Hijack the Invention of Email” on the Huffington Post History of Email Series. In response to the facts, a irrational vocal minority unleashed hell on Dr. Nightingale, Dr. Ayyadurai and the Huffington Post.
Her series was the fourth in a History of Email Series that included an article by Larry Weber on The Boy Who Invented Email, Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, Phd. on The Invention of Email, and Mr. Robert Field on The First Email System. Dr. Ayyadurai's article The Future of Email, would have been the fifth article in the series.
I. A Systematic Method of Attack to Protect a False History of Email
What is also undeniably clear is that this vocal minority, each time any major media house carries the facts about the invention of email, immediately responds with a systematic method of attacks that includes a process that escalates step-by-step. For example, if defamation and character assassination fail (Step 2), they advance to the next step, of simply throwing disinformation and tantrums at the media houses (Step 3). Based on the level of resources, time and integrity of each media house to validate the facts, and not being swayed by their tantrums, their success is determined.
Step 1 - Deny that the inventor of email is Dr. Ayyadurai;
Step 2 – Defame and character assassinate Dr. Ayyadurai or any of his supporters as a “fraud”, “imposter”, “liar”, “curry-stained Indian,” and other expletives;
Step 3 – Attack the media house, journalists, editors, etc., which publish articles sharing the facts e.g. Washington Post, Huffington Post.
Step 4 - Confuse and misinform journalists by: (1) misusing the term “email” (that was originally defined by Dr. Ayyadurai in 1978 to refer to his invention “email”, that was the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system: Inbox, Outbox, etc. that is the email we experience in modern email programs) to refer to earlier work in text messaging by Raytheon/BBN and ARPANET as email, which were clearly not email; (2) lying by equating “electronic messaging” with “email”, so as to discredit Dr. Ayyadurai by stating that Dr. Ayyadurai is claiming to have invented “electronic messaging”, which did exist before 1978.
Step 5 – Distract and dismiss attention of the bare facts by dismissing them as “out of context”, “meaningless”, etc.
Step 6 – Lie by stating that no one can “invent email”.
Step 7 – “Peer Pressure” the media house and journalists, using a cabal of “historians”, “scholars”, “experts” with ties to Raytheon/BBN, by stating that the media house are “idiots”, “stupid”, “know nothing about technology”, and force them to pull down the articles and facts from the web site.
As of today, two major media houses have become victims to this systematic method of attacks, pressure and intimidation: The Washington Post and the Huffington Post. The level of vitriol and abuse against Dr. Ayyadurai and his colleagues are itself a reflection of how those in power react, when their hegemony over false narratives are threatened.
The facts on this situation, however, are “black and white.”
II. Email was thought “impossible” before 1978
The interoffice, inter-organizational mail system was a complex system of interlocking parts that were used by secretaries, office workers, and other ordinary people to process paper mail communications.
In 1978, such ordinary people did not interact with computers. Those who interacted with computers were highly trained technical personnel: computer systems operators, systems analysts, computer programmers, engineers and scientists, who used computers for performing complex scientific and data processing tasks.
The concept of end users, ordinary people interacting with computers, using software applications, as we do today, such as email, spreadsheets, presentation graphics, etc. was inconceivable at that time. In 1978, there were no personal computers (PCs), laptops, iPads and smart phones. Few, if any ordinary people like secretaries, office workers, doctors, dentists and students, for example, had ever touched a computer keyboard or interacted with a computer terminal or ever even “logged in” to use an end user software application.
This is precisely why leading researchers in the ARPAnet research community, highly trained computer engineers and scientists, who were focused on developing rudimentary methods for the simple transfer of electronic messages reliably, thought it inconceivable to build an entire electronic system, for such an untrained, computer illiterate base of end users, to manage the myriad of functions of an inter-organizational mail system.
In the RAND Report, published on December 1977, for example, its author, Mr. David Crocker, a leading member of the ARPAnet community, conveyed the impossibility of creating such a system for such diverse end users, in the Report’s Introductory section, which defined the limits and scope of their then-current work in electronic messaging:
“At this time, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system [p.4]…. The fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users' needs [p.7].”
—Crocker, David. Framework and Function of the “MS” Personal Message System. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, December 1977.
Since the system is to be used for communication which is exemplified in older and heavily-exercised technology, it is assumed that users have an extensive conceptual model of the communication domain. It is further assumed that a system which performs in ways which deviate from that model will be viewed as "idiosyncratic" and impeding the efforts of the user. Problems occurring during this sort of interaction can be expected to be as irritating as having a pen which leaks or a typewriter with keys that jam. Therefore, a major design goal for MS is to provide an integrated set of necessary and sufficient functions which conform to the target user's cognitive model of a regular office-memo system. At this stage, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale inter-organization mail system....
The level of the MS project effort has also had a major effect upon the system's design. To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible with MS. In addition, the fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to users' needs. Consequently, important segments of a full message environment have received little or no attention and decisions have been made with the expectation that other Unix capabilities will be used to augment MS. For example, MS has fairly primitive data-base management (i.e., filing and cataloging) facilities and message folders have been implemented in a way which allows them to be modified by programs, such as text editors, which access them directly, rather than through the message system.
-- Framework and Functions of the "MS" Personal Message System: A Report prepared for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, by David H. Crocker
The historical context in which such statements were expressed is important to understand. They reveal two important insights.
First, ARPAnet researchers were highly trained technical personnel. They were working on technologies to support a homogenous group of “users,” technical people who knew how to program and were facile with the computer. They were not developing software applications for “users of differing expertise,” the secretary or officer worker. The computer, playing a role in the day-to-day life of such end users, was a primordial concept to these ARPAnet researchers.
Second, the ARPAnet researchers were working on creating rudimentary methods to reliably transfer electronic messages from point to point, across multiple nodes of potential failure. Transferring short messages reliably such as: “Charlie take that hill” or “Bomb location 32 degrees North” for battlefield communications was their inspiration. ARPAnet researchers were not being paid to emulate a system for managing interoffice, inter-organizational communications.
The concept of creating the system of interlocking parts to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system – email, was simply beyond their scope of work, or, as they had deemed, “impossible.” In addition to the RAND Report, the False Claims section of http://www.inventorofemail.com, documents research across hundreds of other primary sources, to demonstrate that the work of ARPAnet researchers and others, prior to 1978, was focused on defining and creating simple methods for the exchange of text messages, which were certainly not email.
III. Why Dr. Ayyadurai is the Inventor of Email
Here are technical facts on why Dr. Ayyadurai is the inventor of email:
In 1978, Dr. Ayyadurai created a system of computer programs, which were the first full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system;
Shiva named his system “email”;
The system, email, which he solely created, contained all the features that are strikingly similar, if not exact, to the features and functions in modern email programs such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.; and,
Prior to 1978, there was no intention of other electronic messaging developers, dating as far back to the Morse Code telegraph of the 1800s, to develop email.
There are three clear legal reasons, as documented by fact, why Shiva is the inventor of email:
First, by the act of Shiva creating email, in 1978, he became “the inventor of email”.
Second, in addition to this first point of fact, Shiva also received official recognition by the U.S. government as the inventor of email based on the following facts:
In 1978, when Shiva created email, there was no mechanism to protect software inventions, through either Copyright or Patent;
In 1980, the Copyright Act of 1976 was amended to become the Computer Software Act of 1980, which allowed software inventors to have their software inventions protected through Copyright. Even then the Supreme Court did not recognize Software Patents;
In 1981, Shiva applied for a Copyright to protect his invention of email, which required him to submit copies of portions of his code and User’s Manual to the Library of Congress that made his work publicly accessible; and,
On August 30, 1982, he received official recognition by the U.S. government as the inventor of email, when he was issued the first Copyright for “Email”, “Computer Program for Electronic Mail System”.
Third, during 1980 to 1982, evidence of Shiva’s invention of email appears in three other documents:
The West Essex Tribune Article of 1980;
The Honors Award letter and Certificate from Westinghouse Science Talent Search Committee in 1981; and,
The acknowledgement of Shiva’s invention of email on the front-page of Tech Talk on September 2, 1981, wherein Shiva was one of three students, among the incoming class of 1,041, who was highlighted.
Then on the technical facts alone, Ayyadurai is the inventor of email. However, beyond this, he also received legal and formal recognition by the US government’s then existing laws for software invention. And beyond these two important points, even prior to the Smithsonian news, he received acknowledgement for his invention, as evidenced in at least three (3) other documents, before 2012.
IV. Creation of InventorOfEmail.Com
Shortly after the vitriol, allegations and racism, unleashed by those loyal to Raytheon/BBN, and attacks on the Washington Post in February of 2012, we established the site http://www.inventorofemail.com to set the record straight, beyond the disinformation for Mr. Crocker, SIGCIS, and the like. Many, including the authors of this article, as listed on http://www.inventorofemail.com/site-con ... graphy.asp contributed to that web site by providing content, research, edits, as well as feedback on the site design.
V. The Summary of Attacks on the Washington Post
On February 16, 2012, nearly 33 years after the invention of email, computer code, papers and other artifacts documenting the invention of email were acquired into the Smithsonian. The same day the Washington Post published an article “V.A. Shiva Honored as the Inventor of Email.” This article led to attacks on Dr. Ayyadurai and the Washington Post. Dr. Ayyadurai was called a “Fraud”, “Imposter”, “Dick”, “Asshole”, “Curry-Stained Indian Who Should be Hung and Beaten”, and other deplorable comments. The Washington Post’s reporter and editors were attacked for publishing the article.
A vocal minority led by David Crocker and SIGCIS historians attacked Dr. Ayyadurai and the Washington Post, by confusing the terms “electronic messaging” with “email”, and presented nearly 12 false claims that email was invented before 1978. The Washington Post was unable to respond to these attacks. In the midst of the melee, they simply acquiesced to the barrage of confusion by a “mea culpa” and “correction”.
We, the authors of this release, and others, did respond with the facts on the False Claims Section on the InventorOfEmail.Com, which dissected and demonstrated the myths and lies, of each of the 12 claims made, that included five of them, which were the most ubiquitous. Dr. Nightingale and Dr. Song were the major contributors of this content.
However, during this melee, where Shiva was simply attacked and abused, the reach of tabloids such as Gizmodo, the Blaze, the Verge, and others, suffocated the facts from real investigative journalists ever seeing these facts. Most “journalists” simply cut and pasted the lies and nonsense promulgated by Mr. Crocker, SIGCIS, and from these tabloids, in subsequent articles.
In late 2013, Dr. Ayyadurai, completed a book The Email Revolution, and attempted to get the facts to the general public, which shared the content we had developed, as well as content from the InventorOfEmail.Com site.
Detractors, once again, responded to his book, by going on to Amazon’s website and vandalizing the site and attacking Dr. Ayyadurai, with comments such as fraud, liar and imposter.
June 11, 2012 11:10 p.m.
Speech emerged from our need to articulate grievances. At some point, yelling and pushing was no longer enough, and smacking on the head with stones just hurt too damn much, and we had to find a way to talk about it. It began with grunts and growls. Or maybe pleas for mercy. Maybe the first time a voice kept a stone from breaking a head, that was speech. Yes, I think that would be.
But I can’t speak a word that will stop anonymous cybervandals from posting phony Amazon reviews panning my book, giving my girls shit on Twitter, trying to take down my websites, sending me hatemail, signing me up for free email offers, ordering me pizza, sending me bags of poop, certificates of jerkdom, and really, the kindest one, a free package of Attends. It’s at times like these that having a deep understanding of the universe and an abiding trust in the universe’s merciful nature comes in really handy.
But eventually, sanctity wears thin and you start to seethe.
-- The Real Diary of Charles Carreon, by Charles Carreon
VI. The Summary of Attacks on the Huffington Post
Nearly two (2) years had passed since the abusive attacks on the Washington Post; however, we were consistently committed to getting the facts of email’s history to the general public.
In late 2013, Dr. Nightingale, then Director of MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC), sponsored a special talk by Dr. Ayyadurai to share the facts about email’s invention as well as the larger questions of innovation. Dr. Ayyadurai was a Visiting Researcher at MIT, at the time of this talk.
To commemorate the Anniversary of Email on August 30, 2014, the Huffington Post was given the opportunity to share a History of Email Series, along with a video interview with Dr. Ayyadurai and his 82-Year-Old father Vellayappa Ayyadurai. Larry Weber, Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field, Deborah J. Nightingale, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, contributors to the InventorOfEmail.Com site, reviewed and authored five articles as a part of the Series, which were submitted for review, ahead of time, to the Huffington Post.
As each article came out, on a pre-determined schedule this vocal minority attacked the Huffington Post, Dr. Ayyadurai, and the authors of the article, directly on the site, and through rags such as TechDirt. These attacks included calling Dr. Ayyadurai a fraud, liar and imposter. When Dr. Nightingale’s article, the fourth in the series, entitled “The Five Myths About Email’s History and the ‘Controversy’ Fabricated by Industry Insiders to Hijack the Invention of Email” which focused on Five Myths, an extract of the initial twelve False Claims, was published, the cabal of “historians” and industry insiders unleashed fury on the Huffington Post and on Dr. Nightingale.
VII. Attacks on Wikipedia Article on Shiva Ayyadurai
A reactionary group also took to Wikipedia, and starting in September of 2012, destroyed and defamed Dr. Ayyadurai’s page reducing his page to someone “notable” for just causing a controversy on email. One experienced Wikipedia editor, shared in an email with Dr. Ayyadurai’s assistant the following:
“I seem to have stepped into a mess by accident. Last Friday, I read the new Huffington Post articles about your contributions to e-mail. Afterwards, as an experienced Wikipedia editor, I had a look at the "Email" article, and was surprised that you hadn't received credit for your contributions. Since I have had a great deal of experience writing Wikipedia articles, I got right to work and added several suitable additions to provide credit to your contributions. Right away, my edits were deleted, without discussion, not edited to improve them, but just flat-out deleted. This is the kind of behavior an editor encounters when editing an article on the 2nd Amendment, abortion or other extremely hot topics. The response to my edits has included personal attacks, calling me “ignorant”, “reckless” and the like. Although most editors have been less insulting than that, they have generally been aggressive in rapidly deleting my additions.”
(September 2, 2014, experienced Wikipedia Editor)
It is clear nearly to any rational individual that there is an organized group of irrational individuals dedicated to character assassinating Dr. Ayyadurai, not only to deny his rightful distinction as the inventor of email, but also to destroy and defame his entire career as a scientist and inventor.
Why else has his entire Wikipedia page, in spite of the facts, been deleted of all his accomplishments?
It is time a serious investigation be conducted on those who claim to be “scholars” and “historians” to illuminate all of us to their conflict of interest with Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar corporation, who has the most to lose in this battle, that they have unleashed using their loyal supporters.
About Leslie P. Michelson
Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D. is the Director of High Performance and Research Computing Division, Rutgers Medical School (RMS). In 1975, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), now a part of RMS, recruited Dr. Michelson, a trained theoretical physicist from Brookhaven National Laboratories. His group at RMS develops solutions in the life sciences for research endeavors with demanding computational requirements. In the late 1970’s Michelson’s organization provided the challenge, resources and mentorship that led to the development of the first electronic interoffice memorandum postal system by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. Throughout his career Michelson has been active in the support of the use of networking technologies to advance research and education interests in the State of New Jersey. He was a founder and served as the third president of the New Jersey Intercampus Network, the predecessor of the State’s Higher Education and Research Network, NJEDge.Net.
About Deborah J. Nightingale
Deborah J. Nightingale, Ph.D. is a world-renowned expert in enterprise systems transformation and architecting. For nearly 17 years, Dr. Nightingale served as a Professor of Practice of Engineering Systems, and Aerospace and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). For the past nearly half a decade, she led the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center. Today, she works with some of world’s leading organizations, bringing her strategic systems thinking approaches to transform their enterprises to achieve desired capabilities such as sustainability, flexibility or enhanced innovation and entrepreneurship.
Prior to joining MIT, Dr. Nightingale headed up Strategic Planning and Global Business Development for AlliedSignal Engines. While at AlliedSignal she also held a number of executive leadership positions in operations, engineering, and program management, participating in enterprise-wide operations from concept development to customer support. Prior to joining AlliedSignal, she worked at Wright-Patterson AFB where she served as program manager for computer simulation modeling research, design, and development in support of advanced man-machine design concepts.
Dr. Nightingale has a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in Industrial and Systems Engineering. In addition, she holds MS and BS degrees in Computer and Information Science from The Ohio State University and University of Dayton, respectively. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Past-President and Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers, and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Enterprise Transformation. She is the author of numerous articles and books, including Beyond the Lean Revolution: Achieving Successful and Sustainable Enterprise Transformation and Architecting the Future Enterprise(Spring 2015, MIT Press). Dr. Nightingale is a frequent keynote speaker and serves on a number of boards and national committees, where she interacts extensively with industry, government and academic leaders.
About Sen Song
Sen Song, Ph.D. is pioneer in computational systems and neuroscience, focusing on interdisciplinary research between neuroscience, computer science and artificial intelligence. He is currently a principal investigator in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Brain-like Computation at Tsinghua University. He received his Ph.D. in Computational Neuroscience from Brandeis University in 2002. He received postdoctoral training at MIT and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory before being recruited by Tsinghua University in 2010. He is also experienced in deep learning algorithms and systems biology. During his postdoctoral training at MIT, he used deep learning algorithm in reconstructing brain connectome. He also has extensive industrial experience, being the co-founder of Ikena.com in 1998, which was later acquired by net2phone, developing online collaborative browsing and experience sharing software. From 2001-2002, he was a computational biologist at GPC Biotech, researching genome analyzing algorithms and architecting big-data analysis systems. In 2012, Dr. Song was a key researcher, while at MIT, in uncovering and exposing the false claims of computer “historians” who asserted that email was invented before 1978. During 2012-2013, he was appointed a visiting researcher at Microsoft Research Asia, developing neural network algorithms for image segmentation and recognition.
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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The History of Email
Originates in Newark, NJ, in 1978, when Shiva Ayyadurai, a 14-year old, dark-skinned, lower-caste, Indian immigrant boy, working at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey wrote over 50,000 lines of code to invent the world's first full-scale electronic emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system consisting of: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, the Memo, Attachments, etc., naming the program "email," defining email as we all experience today, for which he received the first Copyright for "Email," in 1982, from the United States government, officially recognizing him as the inventor of email.
Picture of 14-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai with "email" computer program code, from 1978, in the background.
Originates in Newark, NJ, in 1978, when Shiva Ayyadurai, a 14-year old, dark-skinned, lower-caste, Indian immigrant boy, working at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey wrote over 50,000 lines of code to invent the world's first full-scale electronic emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system consisting of: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, the Memo, Attachments, etc., naming the program "email," defining email as we all experience today, for which he received the first Copyright for "Email," in 1982, from the United States government, officially recognizing him as the inventor of email.
Picture of 14-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai with "email" computer program code, from 1978, in the background.
"The efforts to belittle the innovation of a 14-year-old child should lead to reflection on the larger story of how power is gained, maintained, and expanded, and the need to encourage, not undermine, the capacities for creative inquiry that are widely shared and could flourish, if recognized and given the support they deserve. The angry reaction to the news of his invention of EMAIL and the steps taken to belittle the achievement are most unfortunate. They suggest an effort to dismiss the fact that innovation can take place by anyone, in any place, at any time. And they highlight the need to ensure that innovation must not be monopolized by those with power — power which, incidentally, is substantially a public gift."
— Prof. Noam Chomsky, inventorofemail.com, April 2012
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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Part 1 of 2
Origin of Email & Misuses of the Term “Email”
by Deborah J. Nightingale, Sen Song, Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field
NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT
[Abstract: The origin of email, the system as we all know and use today, begins in 1978 when a 14-year-old Research Fellow, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, working at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, New Jersey, invented the first electronic system to replicate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system consisting of Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachment, Address Book, etc. Ayyadurai named this system “email,” a term he was the first to create, because he was inventing the “electronic” or “e” version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based “mail” system. Moreover, the specific naming of email arose for idiosyncratic reasons since FORTRAN IV, the programming language used to create his invention, required all variable and program names to be in upper case and a maximum of six characters, while the Hewlett Packard RTE-IVB operating system, on which the software executed, had a five-character limit for program names. These constraints motivated the selection of “E,” “M,” “A,” “I,” and “L.” Prior to 1978, neither the term “email,” in any variation, upper case, lower case, mixed case, with or without the dash, nor did the software application “email” exist. After Ayyadurai’s invention, the term “email” was misused, primarily by members of the ARPANET community and Raytheon/BBN, to refer to their developments in rudimentary methods for exchanging text messages, done prior to 1978, as “email.” Such developments, while important in their own right, were not email, the system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system -- the email we all experience today.]
Contents:
• 1 Introduction (Deborah J. Nighingale, Sen Song, Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field)
• 2 The Invention of Email in Newark, NJ (1978)
• 3 V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: The Inventor of Email
• 4 Email Is Not the Simple Exchange of Text Messages
• 5 Historical Revisionism of Email’s Origin
• 6 Misuses of the Term “Email”
o 6.1 Misuse #1: “Email” was created on the ARPANET
o 6.2 Misuse #2: Ray Tomlinson Invented “Email” and Sent the First “Email” Message
o 6.3 Misuse #3: The Use of the “@” Symbol Equals the Invention of “Email”
o 6.4 Misuse #4: RFCs Demonstrate “Email” Existed Prior To 1978
o 6.5 Misuse #5: Programs For Exchanging Messages Were “Email”
o 6.6 Misuse #6: Mail On CTSS Developed In 1960's Was “Email”
o 6.7 Misuse #7: In 2012, the Term “Email” Now Needs To Be Defined 6.8 Misuse #8: “Email” Is Not An Invention, But VisiCalc Is An Invention
o 6.9 Misuse #9: Dec And Wang Created “Email”
o 6.10 Misuse #10: Laurel Was “Email”
o 6.11 Misuse #11: The Term “Email” Belongs To Compuserve
o 6.12 Misuse #12: “Email” Has No Single Inventor
• 7 References
Chapter 1: Introduction
What is email? Email is actually a system --- a system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system consisting of the Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Folders, Memo, Attachment, Address Book, etc., the now-familiar components of every email system (Pearl, 1993; Ramey, 1993; Markus, 1994; Tsuei, 2003), made accessible and easy-to-use for ordinary people with little to no computer experience to manage the complex and myriad functions necessary for office communications mediated through the model of the interoffice memorandum (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992; Foster, 1994; Holmes, 1995; Morrisett, 1996).
(a) (b) (c)
Fig. 1. The interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system was managed by office workers who on their desktop (a) used a typewriter, an Inbox to receive mail, an Outbox for outgoing mail, a Drafts box for work in progress, file Folders for storage, etc. to compose and manage the (b) the Memorandum (memo), consisting of the “To:,” “From:,” “Cc:,” “Bcc:,” “Date:,” “Subject:,” the Body, and Attachments, which were placed in an Inter-Office Mail envelope (c) for distribution and delivery across offices and organizations.
The interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, as shown in Figure 1, consisted of the office worker, who created the Memorandum or the memo (“To:,” “From:,” “Cc:,” “Bcc:,” “Date:,” “Subject:,” the Body, and Attachments), and used the interoffice mail envelope to transport the memo to a desired location. Transport of the envelope was done by workers who delivered it by foot, by automobile, and, at times, by an interconnected system of pneumatic tubes, as shown in Figure 2. This paper-based mail system, primarily used during the 1900s, and still used today in some organizations, was the central system of interoffice and inter-organizational paper-based communications from business owners to prime ministers and presidents.
(a) (b)
Fig. 2. Office workers (a) were critical to the functioning of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system; at times, an interconnected system of pneumatic tubes (b) were used to transport mail across offices and organizations.
In 1978, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, a 14-year-old prodigy, who was accepted into a special program in computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York University (NYU) (Mullish, 1978), was hired by Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, initially as a research scholar and later as a Research Fellow, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, New Jersey (Michelson, 2012). Michelson challenged Ayyadurai to create a software application, which would be full-scale electronic version (or emulation) to support all functions of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system (Aamoth, 2012; Nanos, 2013; Gopalakrishnan, 2014), Table 1.
Prior to 1978, experts in the ARPANET community had concluded it “impossible” to invent such a full-scale electronic emulation of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system, as documented in the RAND Report published on December 1977 by Mr. David Crocker, a leading member of the ARPANET community (Crocker, 1977; Nightingale, 2014). Mr. Crocker unequivocally conveyed both the ARPANET researchers’ lack of interest as well as their conclusion to the impossibility of creating such a system in the introductory sections of the Report, which defined the limits and scope of the ARPANET’s then-current work in electronic messaging:
In the 1970s, access to and use of computers were nearly exclusive to highly trained technical personnel such as systems analysts, programmers, scientists and engineers. More importantly, at the time, human interaction with computers required significant technical training that demanded the end user to have knowledge of computer programming languages and cryptic computer codes, making the use of the computer inaccessible to an ordinary person. In this context, one can understand why the idea of an ordinary office worker, a “secretary,” primarily a woman, who was relegated to a typewriter at an office desk, and who likely had never even seen a computer, interacting with one, was thought inconceivable. In addition to overcoming such sociological barriers, “to build a system” that not only incorporated the myriad technological functions of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, as listed in Table 1, but also was designed easy-to-use for “users of differing expertise” from the secretary to the highly trained technical personnel was considered monumental, as reflected in Mr. Crocker’s statement.
Chapter 2: The Invention of Email in Newark, NJ (1978)
The 14-year-old Ayyadurai, however, did not think it impossible to create such a system. He took on Michelson’s challenge (“Livingston Student”, 1980; Michelson, Bodow, Brezenhoff & Field, 2013), and did “attempt” to create such a system, and did do the “impossible,” when he became the first to conceive, design and invent the first software application that replicated myriad functions, as itemized in Table 1, of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system (McLeod & Bender, 1982) so it could be of “use in various organizational contexts” and by “users of differing expertise” ranging from secretaries, office workers, students, doctors, who had never experienced a computer keyboard or terminal, to highly trained technical personnel such as systems analysts, programmers, scientists and engineers, i.e. end users (Cheney & Lyons, 1980; Michelson, et al., 2015).
Ayyadurai named his invention “email” (Smithsonian National Museum of American History [NMAH], 2012; Ayyadurai, 1982a; Ayyadurai, 1982b), a term he was the first to create in 1978, as verified by its first use in naming the main subroutine of his program (Smithsonian National Museum of American History [NMAH], 2012; Ayyadurai, 1982a; Ayyadurai, 1982b), as shown in Figure 3. The non-existence of the term “email,” prior to Ayyadurai’s creation of this term in 1978, is further substantiated by two eminent dictionaries the Oxford English Dictionary (“E-Mail Origin”, 1980) and the Merriam Webster Dictionary (“E-mail; First Known Use”, 1982) by their reference to the dates of origin of the term “email” and its variations, as being after 1978, in 1980 and 1982, respectively.
Fig. 3. The naming of “email” (c. 1978). (Smithsonian National Museum of American History [NMAH], 2012; Ayyadurai, 1982a; Ayyadurai, 1982b)
Ayyadurai named the system “email” because he was inventing the “electronic” or “e” version of the interoffice “mail” system. Moreover, the specific naming of “email” arose from idiosyncratic reasons since the FORTRAN IV programming language, used to build the software, required all variable and program names to be in upper case and a maximum of six characters, while the Hewlett Packard RTE-IVB operating system, on which the software executed, had a five-character limit for program names. These constraints motivated the selection of “E,” “M,” “A,” “I,” and “L.
Chapter 3: V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: The Inventor of Email
On August 30, 1982, the United States government awarded Ayyadurai the first U.S. Copyright for “Email,” “Computer Program for Electronic Mail System” (Ayyadurai, 1982a), officially recognizing Ayyadurai as the inventor of email --- the system of interlocking parts designed to electronically emulate and expand the functionality of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
Fig. 4. The U.S. Government Copyright Issuance for “Email” in 1982, Officially Recognizing Ayyadurai as the Inventor of Email. (Ayyadurai, 1982a).
At time of the invention of email in 1978, there existed no legal methods to protect software inventions. In fact, software patents were non-existent, and questionable at best, since the patentability of software itself was unclear and not recognized by the United States Supreme Court (Flewellen, 1980; Moran and James, 1980). However, in 1980, the United States Copyright Act of 1976 was amended to include software inventions. This resulted in the United States Computer Software Act of 1980 (Crews, 1987; Lemley, et. al., 2006).
In 1981, Ayyadurai, per the compliance requirements of the new Computer Software Act of 1980, applied for legal protection of his invention. In 1982, he received such protection from the United States government, which formalized in government records his being the inventor of email. In addition to being awarded the Copyright for the software “Email,” Ayyadurai was also awarded another Copyright for the software users manual, “Email User’s Manual,” “Operating Manual for Electronic Mail System Program” (Ayyadurai, 1982b). The user’s manual provided the office workers at UMDNJ a detailed guide on how to use email.
Ayyadurai’s distinction as the inventor of email, therefore, emerges from: 1) He being the first to conceive, design and invent the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, containing all the features we experience today in every email program, which experts of the ARPANET community had deemed “impossible”; 2) His creating the term “email” in 1978 to name this invention; and, 3) His receiving formal legal protection and recognition by the United States government as the inventor of email.
The 14-year-old Indian immigrant’s invention, moreover, was likely the world’s first end user software application that made the computer accessible and meaningful to the lives of ordinary people. Ayyadurai’s invention was revolutionary not only for the technological and design challenges that it overcame but also for the sociological and elitist barriers that it broke by enabling ordinary office workers, primarily woman, to move from the typewriter and paper to the terminal and keyboard, where email became their gateway to the brave new world of computing and digital communications.
What is even more compelling is the prescience of the young teenage inventor as to the relevance of his own invention, and its potential to humankind. In 1981, he submitted an essay on his invention for an awards entry to the Thomas Alva Edison/Max McGraw Foundation to be considered for a scholarship to support his attending university (Ayyadurai, 1981). The concluding paragraph in Ayyadurai’s essay reveals that prescience:
His invention did not go unnoticed and began to receive public recognition starting as early as 1980. On October 30, 1980, for example, a feature article, with the headline “Livingston Student Designs Electronic Mail System,” appeared in the West Essex Tribune, which described his development efforts while a high school student involved in a special independent study program setup by a pioneering Livingston High School educator, Ms. Stella Oleksiak (“Livingston Student”, 1980).
On January 21, 1981, the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search Awards, today known as the Intel Science Talent Search Awards, honored his invention by awarding him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Group Award (Westinghouse, 1981).
On September 2, 1981, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the most eminent science and technology institute in the world, also found it important to mention and recognize the invention. On that day, Ayyadurai was attending MIT’s incoming freshman student orientation for the Class of 1985. The front page of the MIT Tech Talk, the official newspaper of the MIT faculty and administration, highlighted achievements of only 3 of the 1,041 students entering the MIT Class of 1985. Ayyadurai was one of them. The article shared his invention of email (Miller, 1981).
Chapter 4: Email Is Not the Simple Exchange of Text Messages
After Ayyadurai’s invention, the term “email” began to be used to refer to methods for the simple exchange of text messages, done prior to 1978. However, email is not simply a method for the rudimentary exchange of text messages (Ngwenyama & Lee, 1997), as some have erroneously documented (Marold & Larsen, 1997), and one which continues to appear even on popular websites such as Wikipedia, which define “email” as “a method of exchanging digital messages” (“Email”, n.d., para 1)
In the 1970s and early 1980s, developing such methods for the simple exchange of text messages was the focus of early workers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its ARPANET research community, Raytheon/Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), and MIT, in order to support military battlefield communications (Kuo, 1979; Lyons, 1980; Postel, Sunshine & Cohen, 1981). The aim of their efforts was to develop methods for the reliable communication of simple text messages from one location to another (Cerf, 1979; Malgieri, 1981).
The invention of email by Ayyadurai at UMDNJ in Newark, New Jersey, in contrast, was not motivated to create such simple point-to-point exchange of text messages for supporting battlefield communications, but rather to create a system to manage the complex functions of day-to-day civilian office communications where the interoffice memo was the primary medium of formal business communications in the office environment (Yates, 1989; Gains, 1999; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994).
The military had little interest in creating a system for managing the interoffice memorandum on the battlefield. This was far beyond their scope of work as the ARPANET was neither designed nor intent on creating email (Patel, 2003). The ARPANET researchers were not being funded by the military to make the lives of ordinary office workers easy. Even as late as 1985, seven years after the invention of email by Ayyadurai in Newark, NJ, the ARPANET’s official brochure, ARPANET Information Brochure (Dennett, Feinler & Perillo, 1985), Figure 5a, makes no mention whatsoever either about “email” or “electronic mail” as evidenced by the lack of existence of any entries in its Index, Figure 5b, starting with “e,” for “email” to be found anywhere in the Index of this brochure.
(a) (b)
Fig. 5. The ARPANET’s ARPANET Information Brochure cover page (a), and the Index on page 45 (b), which makes no mention or use of “email.”
Chapter 5: Historical Revisionism of Email’s Origin
The historical revisionism to re-define the term “email” as the simple exchange of text messages took place after Ayyadurai’s invention so as to misappropriate credit specifically to DARPA, the ARPANET researchers, MIT and Raytheon/ BBN. Following Ayyadurai’s invention of email, Raytheon/BBN, a multibillion dollar defense contractor, created its entire brand image as the “inventor of email,” to provide itself a competitive advantage in the lucrative cyber-security market (Raytheon/BBN. (n.d.). The ARPANET community, including personnel such as Mr. Crocker, now misuse the term “email” to perpetuate the claim that the ARPANET created “email” to perpetuate a false narrative that all great innovations, such as email, only emerge in a “collaboration”(Crocker, 2012) from the realms of the military-industrial-academic complex (Leydesdorff & Etzkowitz, 1996; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000; Carayannis & Campbell, 2011).
The misuses of the term “email” not only attempts to misappropriate credit when the ARPANET community had no intention to create email as they had thought it “impossible,” but also attempts to confuse journalists by equating “email” to be the simple exchanges of text messages so as to obfuscate email’s true origin, away from the monumental achievement of a 14-year-old boy, working in Newark, New Jersey, in 1978. This manuscript itemizes and exposes these misuses, many of which are deliberately perpetuated by a cabal of “historians,” who promote this false narrative as their allegiance, in spite of the overwhelming and overt facts, is to the larger narrative that great innovations, such as email, can only emerge from the military-industrial-academic complex (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012).
The facts are that in 1978, at UMDNJ in Newark, New Jersey, there was no ARPANET, and the invention of email did not depend on any infrastructure or technology created by the ARPANET. The challenge to invent email required Ayyadurai to go far beyond just creating a simple means to exchange text messages. He used a computer network that was already present at UMDNJ and independent of the ARPANET. The challenge demanded him to invent an entire communications platform consisting of a sophisticated database and workflow systems architecture, while implementing the myriad features for enabling interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail communications (Smith, 2011; Gopalakrishnan, 2014) necessary for office workers to move from the world of the typewriter to the realm of the keyboard and computer terminal, delivered through an easy-to-use interface. Ayyadurai’s work was focused on digitizing the entire “system” of interoffice communications rather than just the mere transport of messages reliably from point-to-point (Westinghouse, 1981; Field, 2014).
The components used by Ayyadurai to build email, furthermore, were not based on any tools or technologies built by DARPA or the ARPANET community. The tools used by Ayyadurai to build email were: 1) computer hardware, 2) an operating system, 3) terminals and keyboard, 4) a network, 5) a programming language, and 6) a database system (Michelson, 2012; Field, 2014). These components already existed at UMDNJ in 1978, and none of them were developed by the ARPANET. Erroneous claims promulgated by some “historians,” and copy and pasted in tabloid journals and blogs have asserted that the components used by Ayyadurai to invent email at UMDNJ had been created previously by the ARPANET (Biddle, 2012; Aguilar, 2012). This is simply not true, but is duplicitous, and serves to perpetuate the false and revisionist history, going back to the 1970s, when Raytheon/BBN attempted to [take] credit for having “invented everything,” as noted by the Mr. M.A. Padlipsky, a computer scientist and contemporary of Mr. Crocker, who was also a prolific ARPANET contributor and author of more than 20 RFC specifications.
Mr. Padlipsky, in a famous essay, shared how Raytheon/BBN was habitual in performing such historical revisionism to take credit “…for having invented everything…” (Padlipsky, 2000):
Ayyadurai, as a 14-year-old boy working in Newark, New Jersey, in contrast, sought neither fame nor fortune for his invention of email. His efforts were done independent of the ARPANET or Internet, and ran on its own private network known as the Laboratory Computer Network (LCN), which had been earlier implemented to connect the four campuses of UMDNJ (Michelson, 2014). Email did not need to “transport messages,” but provided a novel database-driven mechanism to share the interoffice memorandum across relevant users and organizational hierarchies, long before Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was made available in 1982 (Postel, 1982a) and which was four years after email’s invention at UMDNJ in 1978.
Therefore, the triangle of DARPA (including the ARPANET community), Raytheon/ BBN and MIT, simply put, cannot take credit for email’s invention. They were solving a different, important, but much easier problem, from Ayyadurai’s mission to create email, the first full-scale electronic emulation of the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. An objective review of these facts that email’s history begins from the civilian interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail communication system at UMDNJ in 1978 and not from the military or its developments prior to 1978 provides a much larger historical lesson that innovation can occur anytime, anyplace by anybody, outside of big universities, military and large corporations (Aamoth, 2013; Garling, 2012; Rocca, 2015).
Chapter 6: Misuses of the Term “Email”
So email as a system is not simply exchanging messages among computers, even if a person at one end types a message to a human recipient. Sending text messages alone is what today we call Texting, SMS, Chat or Twitter. Standard histories of the Internet are full of claims that certain individuals (and teams) in the ARPANET environment in the 1970s and 1980s ‘invented email’. For example, the ‘@’ sign, early programs for sending and receiving messages, and technical specifications known as RFCs, have been claimed to be ‘email’. But as some claimants have admitted, none of these innovations were intended as a system of interlocking parts - Inbox, Memo, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, etc. - the email system used today by billions of people worldwide.
These standard histories have misused the term “email” - which today is understood to be a system of interdependent features - to apply to other forms of electronic communications. Those developments aimed to solve various problems, but were not intended to substitute for the interoffice paper mail system. On February 16, 2012, nearly 35 years after Ayyadurai’s invention of email, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) acquired his papers, artifacts and computer code, documenting his invention in 1978 at UMDNJ. The Smithsonian acquisition led to a vocal minority unleashing disinformation to deny email’s origin in spite of the technical and legal documentation of facts.
These attacks were unwarranted and unfortunate and, as subsequent research revealed, the attacks were motivated by industry insiders intent on protecting the vested interests of Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar company, which, during the period after Ayyadurai’s invention of email in 1978, had built its entire brand on the falsehood that it had “invented email.” Some detractors went so far as to confuse the public by stating that upper case “EMAIL,” was different than lower case “email,” to misappropriate credit away from Ayyadurai.
The eminent linguist Professor Noam Chomsky, during the heated controversy in 2012, responded by stating (Garling, 2012):
These vested interests included a coterie of “historians,” who instigated the harsh vitriol against Ayyadurai in order to deliberately discredit and character assassinate Ayyadurai to distract media and press from the indisputable facts of email’s origin, by spreading disinformation and false claims about email’s origin. Twelve of these false claims, originally itemized, investigated and exposed as disinformation by Drs. Nightingale and Song (Nightingale and Song, 2012) have now been compiled and updated in the Supplementary Materials of this manuscript, to demonstrate how misuses of the term “email” were used to disseminate fiction versus fact on the origin of email. These claims include:
1. “Email” was created on the ARPANET.
2. Ray Tomlinson invented “email” and sent the first “email” message.
3. The use of the “@” symbol equals the invention of “email.
4. RFCs demonstrate “email” existed prior to 1978.
5. Programs for exchanging messages were “email”.
6. Mail On CTSS developed in 1960's was “email”.
7. In 2012, the term “email” now needs to be defined.
8. “Email” is not an invention, but VisiCalc is an invention.
9. Dec and Wang created “email”.
10. Laurel was “email”.
11. The term “email” belongs to Compuserve.
12. “Email” has no single inventor.
The addendum elaborates on each instance and explains why they are misuses of the term “email” by providing references to primary sources that definitively expose that what is referred to as “email,” in such uses, was not email but rudimentary methods for text messaging. The research across hundreds of primary sources concerning these false claims shows that each of these innovations, while very important in the evolution of the Internet, were single functions and never email --- the system of interlocked components intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
6.1 Misuse #1: “Email” was created on the ARPANET
The statement:
misuses the term “email,” since the invention referenced as “email,” and attributed to the ARPANET, in the above statement is command-line protocols for transferring text messages, not email --- a system of interlocking parts designed to be fullscale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
Early workers of the ARPANET community, such as Mr. David Crocker, in the field of electronic messaging, admitted, with great and direct clarity, that the ARPANET community, had no intention to create a full-scale electronic version of the interoffice or inter-organizational paper-based mail system. This is expressed in the following two statements of Mr. Crocker, published in December of 1977, months before Ayyadurai began his work in inventing email.
Moreover, other electronic messaging workers of that same time, such as Tom Van Vleck, affiliated with the ARPANET community, also admitted that their superiors, at the time of their work in electronic messaging, in the early 1970s, made it clear that they were not allowed to work on creating an electronic system to replicate “letters” e.g. the interoffice paper mail system, since it was considered a waste of time, as expressed in this statement:
Mr. Van Vleck, one of the vocal detractors to the news of Ayyadurai’s invention of email in March 2012, after the Washington Post’s news of the February 16, 2012 Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s documents, went to the extent of revising his own Multicians.Org history of email website, in March of 2012, which had remained unchanged for many years, by inserting the word “initially” to the sentence referenced above to read:
This revisionism was done deliberately to give the false impression that somehow, he was allowed, back in his time, by his “management” to implement the “letter”, or interoffice memo, afterwards following an “initial” resistance. Mr. Van Vleck made this revision to his website after the authors of this manuscript’s research team discovered and published Mr. Van Vleck’s original comment that he was not allowed to work on “letters.”
By revising his own website, after our exposure of his lack of intent to invent anything close to email, Mr. Van Vleck was performing historical revisionism on his own material. The research team was fortunate, at the time, to capture in screenshots as shown in Figure 6, which documents this revisionism. Mr. Van Vleck’s historical revisionism was done retroactively to substantiate that he was allowed to work on an electronic system for “letters” so as to take credit for the invention of “email.”
Fig. 6. Blatant example of historical revisionism conducted by Mr. Tom Van Vleck after hearing of Smithsonian’s acquisition of documents validating Ayyadurai’s invention of email at UMDNJ. Before the Smithsonian news of February 16, 2012, Mr. Van Vleck’s website had the content as shown in (a). After the Smithsonian news (c. March 2012), Mr. Van Vleck changed the content to as shown in (b). (Nightingale and Song, 2014b).
This was not the only instance of this kind of revisionism that Mr. Van Vleck deliberately performed. On another part of his website, again after the Smithsonian’s acquisition on February 16, 2012, Mr. Van Vleck revised his own published timeline of the history of email where in that timeline Mr. Van Vleck inserts that he invented email in 1965, as shown in Figure 7A and Figure 7B below (Nightingale and Song, 2014b)
Fig. 7. Another blatant example of historical revisionism conducted by Mr. Tom Van Vleck after hearing of Smithsonian’s acquisition of documents validating Ayyadurai’s invention of email at UMDNJ. Before the Smithsonian news of February 16, 2012, Mr. Van Vleck’s website had the history of email timeline as shown in (a). After the Smithsonian news (c. March 2012), Mr. Van Vleck changed the content to as shown in (b). (Nightingale and Song, 2014b)
6.2 Misuse #2: Ray Tomlinson Invented “Email” and Sent the First “Email” Message
The statements such as these:
misuse the term “email,” since Mr. Ray Tomlinson did not invent email --- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The invention referenced in these statement(s) and attributed to Tomlinson is the simple exchange of text messages between computers. Tomlinson simply modified a pre-existing program called SNDMSG, which he did not write, but made some minor modifications to, in order to enable the exchange of simple text messages across computers.
SNDMSG required a set of cryptic and highly technical computer codes to instruct the computer to transfer a message from one computer to another. Only trained technical personnel, such as computer scientists and technicians, not end users, such as a secretary or office worker with minimal to no computer knowledge, could use such a method. Tomlinson updated this previously existing SNDMSG command program to transmit text strings over a network connection. SNDMSG was not a system of interlocking parts designed for laypersons to manage routine office communications; thus, it was not designed to replicate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
As primary references show, SNDMSG was not only not email but also was just a very rudimentary form of text messaging (Vittal, 1981):
Moreover, Tomlinson, to his own admission, said his work was a “no-brainer” and was merely a minor contribution (Tomlinson, 2012):
Tomlinson’s work was in no manner comparable to the enterprise-class system that Ayyadurai developed at UMDNJ, that was a complete end user application consisting of 50,000 lines of code, built from the ground up, to create email --- the full-scale emulation of the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system in 1978.
What is also alarming, in this context, is that Michael Padlipsky's famous essay, originally linked on Van Vleck’s site, in which Padlipsky exposed Tomlinson’s conflated claim as being the “inventor of email,” (Padlipsky, 2000):
was deleted and removed by Van Vleck (Nightingale & Song 2014b), after the Smithsonian event. Van Vleck’s website used to link to Padlipsky’s article prior to the Smithsonian event.
Prior to the Smithsonian event, Van Vleck also questioned the claim that Tomlinson was the “inventor of email,”; however, after the Smithsonian event, Van Vleck, who by all indications had close and collegial relationships with members of the ARPANET community who were threatened by Ayyadurai’s facts exposing their false claims, changed his sardonic position of Mr. Tomlinson being the “inventor of email,” fell in line with the revised propaganda of Raytheon/BBN, after the Smithsonian event, to deem Tomlinson as the inventor of “network email,” a new term crafted to bequeath credit to the ARPANET community in the face of the mounting facts, following Ayyadurai’s documentation of inventing email in 1978.
6.3 Misuse #3: The Use of the “@” Symbol Equals the Invention of “Email”
The statement:
misuses the term “email” since it implies that Ray Tomlinson’s use of the “@” symbol is equivalent to inventing email -- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The “@” symbol is used to separate the user name from the domain name. The invention referenced in the above statement is the use of the “@” symbol to distinguish two computers when sending a text message. The “@” symbol is not a necessary component of email -- the system of interlocking parts. In some cases “-at” was used (Van Vleck, 2012), or the “.” symbol as in the first email system developed by Ayyadurai.
Some have mistakenly characterized the “@” symbol as something very unique, “underused” and novel. As a point of fact, the “@” symbol was the linekill character on Multics, (Pogran, 2012), another early timesharing system, and created a character conflict for those Multics users trying to use Tomlinson's SNDMSG.
As Kenneth Pogran recalled:
The “@” symbol was “underused” only to the extent that it interfered with some users' host environments. Equating of the “@” symbol with the invention of email was a result of the branding and marketing effort of Raytheon/BBN as obvious on their web site in 2012. After the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s documents, which began to expose the false claims of Raytheon/BBN (Padlipsky, 2000), Raytheon/BBN escalated their PR and marketing efforts as documented on the history of email section on http://www.inventorofemail.com. Raytheon/BBN, in fact, cleverly juxtaposed the “@” symbol with Tomlinson as their brand mascot, with the false claim that he “invented email”.
6.4 Misuse #4: RFCs Demonstrate “Email” Existed Prior To 1978
The statement:
misuses the term “email” since Requests for Comments (RFCs) were simply written documentation, not a computer program, nor software, nor email ---- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system.
RFCs were literally meeting notes following meetings by electronic messaging researchers. RFCs, such as RFC 733, were written documentation not a computer program or code or system. Moreover, statements such as, and others like it:
are hyperboles and conflation of RFCs.
Mr. Sam Biddle, neither a computer scientist nor a software developer, who wrote the statement referenced above, in an article in Gizmodo referencing Ayyadurai as an “asshole” and “dick,” is known for his puerile, sensationalist, and yellow journalism. For example, a few weeks after writing this outrageous article on Ayyadurai, Biddle wrote an article about a virtual Internet dog name “Boo,” which had died. It was later found out that “Boo” had not died. Anderson Cooper, a CNN journalist, later exposed Mr. Biddle’s quality of journalism on his TV news show “The Ridiculist.”
What is unfortunate is that even scholarly “historians,” like Mr. Thomas Haigh, a leader of the SIGCIS group, and others either purposely wanting to deny the facts of email’s origin from 1978 at UMDNJ, or unconsciously cutting and copying the Gizmodo article, believing Biddle’s sensationalistic article to be the truth, continue to use Biddle’s article as a primary and scholarly source reference to deny email’s invention by Ayyadurai in Newark, New Jersey. Such tabloid articles are referenced as the primary source on Wikipedia and some major media to attempt to perpetuate false assertions that RFCs are email, and predate Ayyadurai’s invention.
Specifically, RFC 733, for example, is a document that was drafted in November 1977, and was simply, at best, a specification attempting to provide a standardization of messaging protocols and interfaces. RFC 733 should not be conflated as “email underpinnings” (Biddle, 2012) and equated as email --- the electronic system of interlocking parts emulating the interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system created by Ayyadurai at UMDNJ in 1978.The RFC 733 is explicitly described as:
RFC 733 did not even dictate which features of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail process would be included, such as the basic components of the user interfaces for message creation and reading. Moreover, RFC 733 attempted to define a standard that was never even fully accepted nor implemented. (Crocker et al., 1977).
The very term “RFC” means “Request for Comments” and were typically lists, notes and at best specifications (Shicker, 1981) on what could be in the future, but were neither computer code nor software application, such as email, the system and software application developed by Ayyadurai.
In summary, RFCs only proposed an interface for message format and transmission, but said little about feature sets of individual electronic messaging or mail systems. The RFCs’ authors, by their own admission, clearly state this was not their intention. RFCs were the definition of command-line terminology, at best, but certainly not email --- the system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
6.5 Misuse #5: Programs For Exchanging Messages Were “Email”
The statement:
misuses the term “email” since programs like Hermes and Laurel were not email - -- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Laurel was really, in fact, a single component, front-end for the independent, lower-level Grapevine messaging platform (Schroeder, 1984).
Though Laurel was beginning to incorporate some elements of the interlocked parts such as folders and the inbox, it was still like nearly all messaging systems of the period: heavily dependent on external system resources, and not designed as a system of interlocking parts to be a full-scale emulation of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system.
Furthermore, internal Xerox documentation (Schroeder, 1984), such as:
shows that independent Grapevine component was still being prototyped with five dedicated servers in 1981, well after Ayyadurai’s invention of email (from 1978) which had been in use in routine communications at UMDNJ for several years by 1980. No word of Laurel or Grapevine, moreover, is publicly available until 1982 (Tesler, 2012). Larry Tesler, who worked at Xerox during 1973 to 1980 on the internal development of Laurel, acknowledges that he himself did not
Tesler, however, was aware that Laurel was still under development in 1979 (Tesler, 2012), when the Xerox work would be published in the Communications of the ACM (Schroeder, 1984, Birrell, 1980).
Hermes was similar. It was not a system of interlocked parts and not something user-friendly that an ordinary office worker could use. Users had to learn about twenty commands to use it (Vallee, 1984):
Another program, PLATO, which was an invention for computer-assisted instruction, which some reference as “email,” also is best understood from Vallee’s comments, which also help to place in context PLATO relative to Ayyadurai’s invention (Vallee, 1984). In 1979, all known messaging systems were itemized in RFC 808 by the leading researchers who worked at the big universities, large companies and for the military (Postel, 1982b):
Note, Laurel and PLATO do not appear on this list in Postel’s “Appendix A” as late as 1982.
For a review of individual systems of the period, it is best to look at the 1979 RFC (‘IETF Tools’, 2012), which contains a listing of the names of all the computer mail systems anybody had ever heard of, at the time. The vast majority of the systems, itemized in this list, such as MSG, MS, SNDMSG, RD, and HERMES, all share a common ancestry, and inherit features (and deficiencies) from this heritage. John Vittal tried to distinguish the features and qualities of his MSG message system relative to its antecedents (Vittal, 1981):
In Vittal's conclusion, he was careful to stress the limitations of MSG as a general communications tool:
Vittal states,
MSG was at best a rudimentary text messaging client. It was lightweight messaging system, designed to aid users of the TENEX operating system. It served its purpose well, but was crippled by a limited feature set, and was not email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, interlocked paperbased mail system.
Origin of Email & Misuses of the Term “Email”
by Deborah J. Nightingale, Sen Song, Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field
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[Abstract: The origin of email, the system as we all know and use today, begins in 1978 when a 14-year-old Research Fellow, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, working at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, New Jersey, invented the first electronic system to replicate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system consisting of Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachment, Address Book, etc. Ayyadurai named this system “email,” a term he was the first to create, because he was inventing the “electronic” or “e” version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based “mail” system. Moreover, the specific naming of email arose for idiosyncratic reasons since FORTRAN IV, the programming language used to create his invention, required all variable and program names to be in upper case and a maximum of six characters, while the Hewlett Packard RTE-IVB operating system, on which the software executed, had a five-character limit for program names. These constraints motivated the selection of “E,” “M,” “A,” “I,” and “L.” Prior to 1978, neither the term “email,” in any variation, upper case, lower case, mixed case, with or without the dash, nor did the software application “email” exist. After Ayyadurai’s invention, the term “email” was misused, primarily by members of the ARPANET community and Raytheon/BBN, to refer to their developments in rudimentary methods for exchanging text messages, done prior to 1978, as “email.” Such developments, while important in their own right, were not email, the system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system -- the email we all experience today.]
Contents:
• 1 Introduction (Deborah J. Nighingale, Sen Song, Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field)
• 2 The Invention of Email in Newark, NJ (1978)
• 3 V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: The Inventor of Email
• 4 Email Is Not the Simple Exchange of Text Messages
• 5 Historical Revisionism of Email’s Origin
• 6 Misuses of the Term “Email”
o 6.1 Misuse #1: “Email” was created on the ARPANET
o 6.2 Misuse #2: Ray Tomlinson Invented “Email” and Sent the First “Email” Message
o 6.3 Misuse #3: The Use of the “@” Symbol Equals the Invention of “Email”
o 6.4 Misuse #4: RFCs Demonstrate “Email” Existed Prior To 1978
o 6.5 Misuse #5: Programs For Exchanging Messages Were “Email”
o 6.6 Misuse #6: Mail On CTSS Developed In 1960's Was “Email”
o 6.7 Misuse #7: In 2012, the Term “Email” Now Needs To Be Defined 6.8 Misuse #8: “Email” Is Not An Invention, But VisiCalc Is An Invention
o 6.9 Misuse #9: Dec And Wang Created “Email”
o 6.10 Misuse #10: Laurel Was “Email”
o 6.11 Misuse #11: The Term “Email” Belongs To Compuserve
o 6.12 Misuse #12: “Email” Has No Single Inventor
• 7 References
Chapter 1: Introduction
“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.” (Garling, 2012)
-- Professor Noam Chomsky, MIT, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics
What is email? Email is actually a system --- a system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system consisting of the Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Folders, Memo, Attachment, Address Book, etc., the now-familiar components of every email system (Pearl, 1993; Ramey, 1993; Markus, 1994; Tsuei, 2003), made accessible and easy-to-use for ordinary people with little to no computer experience to manage the complex and myriad functions necessary for office communications mediated through the model of the interoffice memorandum (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992; Foster, 1994; Holmes, 1995; Morrisett, 1996).
(a) (b) (c)
Fig. 1. The interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system was managed by office workers who on their desktop (a) used a typewriter, an Inbox to receive mail, an Outbox for outgoing mail, a Drafts box for work in progress, file Folders for storage, etc. to compose and manage the (b) the Memorandum (memo), consisting of the “To:,” “From:,” “Cc:,” “Bcc:,” “Date:,” “Subject:,” the Body, and Attachments, which were placed in an Inter-Office Mail envelope (c) for distribution and delivery across offices and organizations.
The interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, as shown in Figure 1, consisted of the office worker, who created the Memorandum or the memo (“To:,” “From:,” “Cc:,” “Bcc:,” “Date:,” “Subject:,” the Body, and Attachments), and used the interoffice mail envelope to transport the memo to a desired location. Transport of the envelope was done by workers who delivered it by foot, by automobile, and, at times, by an interconnected system of pneumatic tubes, as shown in Figure 2. This paper-based mail system, primarily used during the 1900s, and still used today in some organizations, was the central system of interoffice and inter-organizational paper-based communications from business owners to prime ministers and presidents.
(a) (b)
Fig. 2. Office workers (a) were critical to the functioning of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system; at times, an interconnected system of pneumatic tubes (b) were used to transport mail across offices and organizations.
In 1978, V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, a 14-year-old prodigy, who was accepted into a special program in computer science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in New York University (NYU) (Mullish, 1978), was hired by Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, initially as a research scholar and later as a Research Fellow, at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), located in Newark, New Jersey (Michelson, 2012). Michelson challenged Ayyadurai to create a software application, which would be full-scale electronic version (or emulation) to support all functions of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system (Aamoth, 2012; Nanos, 2013; Gopalakrishnan, 2014), Table 1.
Prior to 1978, experts in the ARPANET community had concluded it “impossible” to invent such a full-scale electronic emulation of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system, as documented in the RAND Report published on December 1977 by Mr. David Crocker, a leading member of the ARPANET community (Crocker, 1977; Nightingale, 2014). Mr. Crocker unequivocally conveyed both the ARPANET researchers’ lack of interest as well as their conclusion to the impossibility of creating such a system in the introductory sections of the Report, which defined the limits and scope of the ARPANET’s then-current work in electronic messaging:
"At this time, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system [p.4]…. The fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users' needs [p.7].” (Crocker, 1977)
-- Mr. David Crocker ARPANET Researcher, December 1977
In the 1970s, access to and use of computers were nearly exclusive to highly trained technical personnel such as systems analysts, programmers, scientists and engineers. More importantly, at the time, human interaction with computers required significant technical training that demanded the end user to have knowledge of computer programming languages and cryptic computer codes, making the use of the computer inaccessible to an ordinary person. In this context, one can understand why the idea of an ordinary office worker, a “secretary,” primarily a woman, who was relegated to a typewriter at an office desk, and who likely had never even seen a computer, interacting with one, was thought inconceivable. In addition to overcoming such sociological barriers, “to build a system” that not only incorporated the myriad technological functions of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, as listed in Table 1, but also was designed easy-to-use for “users of differing expertise” from the secretary to the highly trained technical personnel was considered monumental, as reflected in Mr. Crocker’s statement.
Chapter 2: The Invention of Email in Newark, NJ (1978)
The 14-year-old Ayyadurai, however, did not think it impossible to create such a system. He took on Michelson’s challenge (“Livingston Student”, 1980; Michelson, Bodow, Brezenhoff & Field, 2013), and did “attempt” to create such a system, and did do the “impossible,” when he became the first to conceive, design and invent the first software application that replicated myriad functions, as itemized in Table 1, of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system (McLeod & Bender, 1982) so it could be of “use in various organizational contexts” and by “users of differing expertise” ranging from secretaries, office workers, students, doctors, who had never experienced a computer keyboard or terminal, to highly trained technical personnel such as systems analysts, programmers, scientists and engineers, i.e. end users (Cheney & Lyons, 1980; Michelson, et al., 2015).
Ayyadurai named his invention “email” (Smithsonian National Museum of American History [NMAH], 2012; Ayyadurai, 1982a; Ayyadurai, 1982b), a term he was the first to create in 1978, as verified by its first use in naming the main subroutine of his program (Smithsonian National Museum of American History [NMAH], 2012; Ayyadurai, 1982a; Ayyadurai, 1982b), as shown in Figure 3. The non-existence of the term “email,” prior to Ayyadurai’s creation of this term in 1978, is further substantiated by two eminent dictionaries the Oxford English Dictionary (“E-Mail Origin”, 1980) and the Merriam Webster Dictionary (“E-mail; First Known Use”, 1982) by their reference to the dates of origin of the term “email” and its variations, as being after 1978, in 1980 and 1982, respectively.
Fig. 3. The naming of “email” (c. 1978). (Smithsonian National Museum of American History [NMAH], 2012; Ayyadurai, 1982a; Ayyadurai, 1982b)
Ayyadurai named the system “email” because he was inventing the “electronic” or “e” version of the interoffice “mail” system. Moreover, the specific naming of “email” arose from idiosyncratic reasons since the FORTRAN IV programming language, used to build the software, required all variable and program names to be in upper case and a maximum of six characters, while the Hewlett Packard RTE-IVB operating system, on which the software executed, had a five-character limit for program names. These constraints motivated the selection of “E,” “M,” “A,” “I,” and “L.
Chapter 3: V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: The Inventor of Email
On August 30, 1982, the United States government awarded Ayyadurai the first U.S. Copyright for “Email,” “Computer Program for Electronic Mail System” (Ayyadurai, 1982a), officially recognizing Ayyadurai as the inventor of email --- the system of interlocking parts designed to electronically emulate and expand the functionality of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
Fig. 4. The U.S. Government Copyright Issuance for “Email” in 1982, Officially Recognizing Ayyadurai as the Inventor of Email. (Ayyadurai, 1982a).
At time of the invention of email in 1978, there existed no legal methods to protect software inventions. In fact, software patents were non-existent, and questionable at best, since the patentability of software itself was unclear and not recognized by the United States Supreme Court (Flewellen, 1980; Moran and James, 1980). However, in 1980, the United States Copyright Act of 1976 was amended to include software inventions. This resulted in the United States Computer Software Act of 1980 (Crews, 1987; Lemley, et. al., 2006).
In 1981, Ayyadurai, per the compliance requirements of the new Computer Software Act of 1980, applied for legal protection of his invention. In 1982, he received such protection from the United States government, which formalized in government records his being the inventor of email. In addition to being awarded the Copyright for the software “Email,” Ayyadurai was also awarded another Copyright for the software users manual, “Email User’s Manual,” “Operating Manual for Electronic Mail System Program” (Ayyadurai, 1982b). The user’s manual provided the office workers at UMDNJ a detailed guide on how to use email.
Ayyadurai’s distinction as the inventor of email, therefore, emerges from: 1) He being the first to conceive, design and invent the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, containing all the features we experience today in every email program, which experts of the ARPANET community had deemed “impossible”; 2) His creating the term “email” in 1978 to name this invention; and, 3) His receiving formal legal protection and recognition by the United States government as the inventor of email.
The 14-year-old Indian immigrant’s invention, moreover, was likely the world’s first end user software application that made the computer accessible and meaningful to the lives of ordinary people. Ayyadurai’s invention was revolutionary not only for the technological and design challenges that it overcame but also for the sociological and elitist barriers that it broke by enabling ordinary office workers, primarily woman, to move from the typewriter and paper to the terminal and keyboard, where email became their gateway to the brave new world of computing and digital communications.
What is even more compelling is the prescience of the young teenage inventor as to the relevance of his own invention, and its potential to humankind. In 1981, he submitted an essay on his invention for an awards entry to the Thomas Alva Edison/Max McGraw Foundation to be considered for a scholarship to support his attending university (Ayyadurai, 1981). The concluding paragraph in Ayyadurai’s essay reveals that prescience:
“[Email]’s practical applications are unlimited. Not only is mail sent electronically, as many telexes and teletypes are capable of doing, but it offers a computational service that automates a secretary’s or file clerk’s work of writing a memorandum, document or letter, editing, filing, and retrieving. If electronic mail systems become a reality, they will surely create different patterns of communication, attitudes, and styles. Volumes of written work, for example, shall become obsolete.” (Ayyadurai, 1981)
-- V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai in 1981, Livingston High School Thomas Alva Edison/Max McGraw Awards Application
His invention did not go unnoticed and began to receive public recognition starting as early as 1980. On October 30, 1980, for example, a feature article, with the headline “Livingston Student Designs Electronic Mail System,” appeared in the West Essex Tribune, which described his development efforts while a high school student involved in a special independent study program setup by a pioneering Livingston High School educator, Ms. Stella Oleksiak (“Livingston Student”, 1980).
On January 21, 1981, the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search Awards, today known as the Intel Science Talent Search Awards, honored his invention by awarding him the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors Group Award (Westinghouse, 1981).
On September 2, 1981, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the most eminent science and technology institute in the world, also found it important to mention and recognize the invention. On that day, Ayyadurai was attending MIT’s incoming freshman student orientation for the Class of 1985. The front page of the MIT Tech Talk, the official newspaper of the MIT faculty and administration, highlighted achievements of only 3 of the 1,041 students entering the MIT Class of 1985. Ayyadurai was one of them. The article shared his invention of email (Miller, 1981).
Chapter 4: Email Is Not the Simple Exchange of Text Messages
After Ayyadurai’s invention, the term “email” began to be used to refer to methods for the simple exchange of text messages, done prior to 1978. However, email is not simply a method for the rudimentary exchange of text messages (Ngwenyama & Lee, 1997), as some have erroneously documented (Marold & Larsen, 1997), and one which continues to appear even on popular websites such as Wikipedia, which define “email” as “a method of exchanging digital messages” (“Email”, n.d., para 1)
In the 1970s and early 1980s, developing such methods for the simple exchange of text messages was the focus of early workers at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its ARPANET research community, Raytheon/Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), and MIT, in order to support military battlefield communications (Kuo, 1979; Lyons, 1980; Postel, Sunshine & Cohen, 1981). The aim of their efforts was to develop methods for the reliable communication of simple text messages from one location to another (Cerf, 1979; Malgieri, 1981).
The invention of email by Ayyadurai at UMDNJ in Newark, New Jersey, in contrast, was not motivated to create such simple point-to-point exchange of text messages for supporting battlefield communications, but rather to create a system to manage the complex functions of day-to-day civilian office communications where the interoffice memo was the primary medium of formal business communications in the office environment (Yates, 1989; Gains, 1999; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994).
The military had little interest in creating a system for managing the interoffice memorandum on the battlefield. This was far beyond their scope of work as the ARPANET was neither designed nor intent on creating email (Patel, 2003). The ARPANET researchers were not being funded by the military to make the lives of ordinary office workers easy. Even as late as 1985, seven years after the invention of email by Ayyadurai in Newark, NJ, the ARPANET’s official brochure, ARPANET Information Brochure (Dennett, Feinler & Perillo, 1985), Figure 5a, makes no mention whatsoever either about “email” or “electronic mail” as evidenced by the lack of existence of any entries in its Index, Figure 5b, starting with “e,” for “email” to be found anywhere in the Index of this brochure.
(a) (b)
Fig. 5. The ARPANET’s ARPANET Information Brochure cover page (a), and the Index on page 45 (b), which makes no mention or use of “email.”
Chapter 5: Historical Revisionism of Email’s Origin
The historical revisionism to re-define the term “email” as the simple exchange of text messages took place after Ayyadurai’s invention so as to misappropriate credit specifically to DARPA, the ARPANET researchers, MIT and Raytheon/ BBN. Following Ayyadurai’s invention of email, Raytheon/BBN, a multibillion dollar defense contractor, created its entire brand image as the “inventor of email,” to provide itself a competitive advantage in the lucrative cyber-security market (Raytheon/BBN. (n.d.). The ARPANET community, including personnel such as Mr. Crocker, now misuse the term “email” to perpetuate the claim that the ARPANET created “email” to perpetuate a false narrative that all great innovations, such as email, only emerge in a “collaboration”(Crocker, 2012) from the realms of the military-industrial-academic complex (Leydesdorff & Etzkowitz, 1996; Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 2000; Carayannis & Campbell, 2011).
The misuses of the term “email” not only attempts to misappropriate credit when the ARPANET community had no intention to create email as they had thought it “impossible,” but also attempts to confuse journalists by equating “email” to be the simple exchanges of text messages so as to obfuscate email’s true origin, away from the monumental achievement of a 14-year-old boy, working in Newark, New Jersey, in 1978. This manuscript itemizes and exposes these misuses, many of which are deliberately perpetuated by a cabal of “historians,” who promote this false narrative as their allegiance, in spite of the overwhelming and overt facts, is to the larger narrative that great innovations, such as email, can only emerge from the military-industrial-academic complex (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012).
The facts are that in 1978, at UMDNJ in Newark, New Jersey, there was no ARPANET, and the invention of email did not depend on any infrastructure or technology created by the ARPANET. The challenge to invent email required Ayyadurai to go far beyond just creating a simple means to exchange text messages. He used a computer network that was already present at UMDNJ and independent of the ARPANET. The challenge demanded him to invent an entire communications platform consisting of a sophisticated database and workflow systems architecture, while implementing the myriad features for enabling interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail communications (Smith, 2011; Gopalakrishnan, 2014) necessary for office workers to move from the world of the typewriter to the realm of the keyboard and computer terminal, delivered through an easy-to-use interface. Ayyadurai’s work was focused on digitizing the entire “system” of interoffice communications rather than just the mere transport of messages reliably from point-to-point (Westinghouse, 1981; Field, 2014).
The components used by Ayyadurai to build email, furthermore, were not based on any tools or technologies built by DARPA or the ARPANET community. The tools used by Ayyadurai to build email were: 1) computer hardware, 2) an operating system, 3) terminals and keyboard, 4) a network, 5) a programming language, and 6) a database system (Michelson, 2012; Field, 2014). These components already existed at UMDNJ in 1978, and none of them were developed by the ARPANET. Erroneous claims promulgated by some “historians,” and copy and pasted in tabloid journals and blogs have asserted that the components used by Ayyadurai to invent email at UMDNJ had been created previously by the ARPANET (Biddle, 2012; Aguilar, 2012). This is simply not true, but is duplicitous, and serves to perpetuate the false and revisionist history, going back to the 1970s, when Raytheon/BBN attempted to [take] credit for having “invented everything,” as noted by the Mr. M.A. Padlipsky, a computer scientist and contemporary of Mr. Crocker, who was also a prolific ARPANET contributor and author of more than 20 RFC specifications.
Mr. Padlipsky, in a famous essay, shared how Raytheon/BBN was habitual in performing such historical revisionism to take credit “…for having invented everything…” (Padlipsky, 2000):
“[T]he[Raytheon/]BBN guys - who always seemed to get to write the histories and hence always seemed to have claimed to have invented everything, anyway, perhaps because BBN was the only "for-profit" to furnish key members of the original Network Working Group.”
-- Mr. M.A. Padlipsky, ARPANET Researcher
Ayyadurai, as a 14-year-old boy working in Newark, New Jersey, in contrast, sought neither fame nor fortune for his invention of email. His efforts were done independent of the ARPANET or Internet, and ran on its own private network known as the Laboratory Computer Network (LCN), which had been earlier implemented to connect the four campuses of UMDNJ (Michelson, 2014). Email did not need to “transport messages,” but provided a novel database-driven mechanism to share the interoffice memorandum across relevant users and organizational hierarchies, long before Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) was made available in 1982 (Postel, 1982a) and which was four years after email’s invention at UMDNJ in 1978.
Therefore, the triangle of DARPA (including the ARPANET community), Raytheon/ BBN and MIT, simply put, cannot take credit for email’s invention. They were solving a different, important, but much easier problem, from Ayyadurai’s mission to create email, the first full-scale electronic emulation of the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. An objective review of these facts that email’s history begins from the civilian interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail communication system at UMDNJ in 1978 and not from the military or its developments prior to 1978 provides a much larger historical lesson that innovation can occur anytime, anyplace by anybody, outside of big universities, military and large corporations (Aamoth, 2013; Garling, 2012; Rocca, 2015).
Chapter 6: Misuses of the Term “Email”
So email as a system is not simply exchanging messages among computers, even if a person at one end types a message to a human recipient. Sending text messages alone is what today we call Texting, SMS, Chat or Twitter. Standard histories of the Internet are full of claims that certain individuals (and teams) in the ARPANET environment in the 1970s and 1980s ‘invented email’. For example, the ‘@’ sign, early programs for sending and receiving messages, and technical specifications known as RFCs, have been claimed to be ‘email’. But as some claimants have admitted, none of these innovations were intended as a system of interlocking parts - Inbox, Memo, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, etc. - the email system used today by billions of people worldwide.
These standard histories have misused the term “email” - which today is understood to be a system of interdependent features - to apply to other forms of electronic communications. Those developments aimed to solve various problems, but were not intended to substitute for the interoffice paper mail system. On February 16, 2012, nearly 35 years after Ayyadurai’s invention of email, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) acquired his papers, artifacts and computer code, documenting his invention in 1978 at UMDNJ. The Smithsonian acquisition led to a vocal minority unleashing disinformation to deny email’s origin in spite of the technical and legal documentation of facts.
These attacks were unwarranted and unfortunate and, as subsequent research revealed, the attacks were motivated by industry insiders intent on protecting the vested interests of Raytheon/BBN, a multi-billion dollar company, which, during the period after Ayyadurai’s invention of email in 1978, had built its entire brand on the falsehood that it had “invented email.” Some detractors went so far as to confuse the public by stating that upper case “EMAIL,” was different than lower case “email,” to misappropriate credit away from Ayyadurai.
The eminent linguist Professor Noam Chomsky, during the heated controversy in 2012, responded by stating (Garling, 2012):
“What continue[s] to be deplorable are the childish tantrums of industry insiders who now believe that by creating confusion on the case of ‘email,’ they can distract attention from the facts….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.”
-- Professor Noam Chomsky, MIT, Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics
These vested interests included a coterie of “historians,” who instigated the harsh vitriol against Ayyadurai in order to deliberately discredit and character assassinate Ayyadurai to distract media and press from the indisputable facts of email’s origin, by spreading disinformation and false claims about email’s origin. Twelve of these false claims, originally itemized, investigated and exposed as disinformation by Drs. Nightingale and Song (Nightingale and Song, 2012) have now been compiled and updated in the Supplementary Materials of this manuscript, to demonstrate how misuses of the term “email” were used to disseminate fiction versus fact on the origin of email. These claims include:
1. “Email” was created on the ARPANET.
2. Ray Tomlinson invented “email” and sent the first “email” message.
3. The use of the “@” symbol equals the invention of “email.
4. RFCs demonstrate “email” existed prior to 1978.
5. Programs for exchanging messages were “email”.
6. Mail On CTSS developed in 1960's was “email”.
7. In 2012, the term “email” now needs to be defined.
8. “Email” is not an invention, but VisiCalc is an invention.
9. Dec and Wang created “email”.
10. Laurel was “email”.
11. The term “email” belongs to Compuserve.
12. “Email” has no single inventor.
The addendum elaborates on each instance and explains why they are misuses of the term “email” by providing references to primary sources that definitively expose that what is referred to as “email,” in such uses, was not email but rudimentary methods for text messaging. The research across hundreds of primary sources concerning these false claims shows that each of these innovations, while very important in the evolution of the Internet, were single functions and never email --- the system of interlocked components intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
6.1 Misuse #1: “Email” was created on the ARPANET
The statement:
“Under ARPANET several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network,” (Bellis, 2012)
misuses the term “email,” since the invention referenced as “email,” and attributed to the ARPANET, in the above statement is command-line protocols for transferring text messages, not email --- a system of interlocking parts designed to be fullscale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
Early workers of the ARPANET community, such as Mr. David Crocker, in the field of electronic messaging, admitted, with great and direct clarity, that the ARPANET community, had no intention to create a full-scale electronic version of the interoffice or inter-organizational paper-based mail system. This is expressed in the following two statements of Mr. Crocker, published in December of 1977, months before Ayyadurai began his work in inventing email.
“At this time, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system. p.4” (Crocker, 1977)
“The level of the MS project effort has also had a major effect upon the system’s design. To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible with MS. In addition, the fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users’ needs. p.7” (Crocker, 1977)
Moreover, other electronic messaging workers of that same time, such as Tom Van Vleck, affiliated with the ARPANET community, also admitted that their superiors, at the time of their work in electronic messaging, in the early 1970s, made it clear that they were not allowed to work on creating an electronic system to replicate “letters” e.g. the interoffice paper mail system, since it was considered a waste of time, as expressed in this statement:
“The idea of sending ‘letters’ using [the Compatible Time-Sharing System] was resisted by management, as a waste of resources.” (Van Vleck, 2001)
Mr. Van Vleck, one of the vocal detractors to the news of Ayyadurai’s invention of email in March 2012, after the Washington Post’s news of the February 16, 2012 Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s documents, went to the extent of revising his own Multicians.Org history of email website, in March of 2012, which had remained unchanged for many years, by inserting the word “initially” to the sentence referenced above to read:
“The idea of initially sending ‘letters’ using [the Compatible Time-Sharing System] was resisted by management, as a waste of resources.” (Nightingale and Song, 2014b)
This revisionism was done deliberately to give the false impression that somehow, he was allowed, back in his time, by his “management” to implement the “letter”, or interoffice memo, afterwards following an “initial” resistance. Mr. Van Vleck made this revision to his website after the authors of this manuscript’s research team discovered and published Mr. Van Vleck’s original comment that he was not allowed to work on “letters.”
By revising his own website, after our exposure of his lack of intent to invent anything close to email, Mr. Van Vleck was performing historical revisionism on his own material. The research team was fortunate, at the time, to capture in screenshots as shown in Figure 6, which documents this revisionism. Mr. Van Vleck’s historical revisionism was done retroactively to substantiate that he was allowed to work on an electronic system for “letters” so as to take credit for the invention of “email.”
BEFORE (a)
Note: Van Vleck clearly states that CTSS management resisted allowing him to create a system for sending "letters" e.g. To, From, Cc, Bcc, etc, but would allow him to create a system for sending/receiving, requests, e.g. text messages.
Here is the Original Text
"The Idea of sending 'letters' using CTSS was resisted by management, as a waste of resources. However, CTSS Operations did need a facility to inform users when a request to retrieve a file from tape had been completed, and we proposed MAIL as a solution for this need."
AFTER (b)
Note: Now, "initially" added -- subtle but a BIG difference.
Here is the Revised Text
"The Idea of sending 'letters' using CTSS was initially resisted by management, as a waste of resources. However, CTSS Operations did need a facility to inform users when a request to retrieve a file from tape had been completed, and we proposed MAIL as a solution for this need."
Fig. 6. Blatant example of historical revisionism conducted by Mr. Tom Van Vleck after hearing of Smithsonian’s acquisition of documents validating Ayyadurai’s invention of email at UMDNJ. Before the Smithsonian news of February 16, 2012, Mr. Van Vleck’s website had the content as shown in (a). After the Smithsonian news (c. March 2012), Mr. Van Vleck changed the content to as shown in (b). (Nightingale and Song, 2014b).
This was not the only instance of this kind of revisionism that Mr. Van Vleck deliberately performed. On another part of his website, again after the Smithsonian’s acquisition on February 16, 2012, Mr. Van Vleck revised his own published timeline of the history of email where in that timeline Mr. Van Vleck inserts that he invented email in 1965, as shown in Figure 7A and Figure 7B below (Nightingale and Song, 2014b)
BEFORE (a)
1971 Ray Tomlinson develops an email application for over the ARPAN ... message had been received Tomlinson chose the "@" sign for email ...
1970 - Monty Python Spam Skit airs
1960s Email developed for time share computers (individuals could me ...
1890s, USPS declared it illegal to deliver paper messages through pneu ...
AFTER (b)
1971 Ray Tomlinson develops an email application for over the ARPAN ... received Tomlinson chose the "@" sign for email addresses.
1970 - Monty Python Spam Skit airs
1965 Noel Morris and Tom Van Vleck invent email
1960s Email developed for time share computers (individuals could me ...
1890s, USPS declared it illegal to deliver paper messages through pneu ...
Fig. 7. Another blatant example of historical revisionism conducted by Mr. Tom Van Vleck after hearing of Smithsonian’s acquisition of documents validating Ayyadurai’s invention of email at UMDNJ. Before the Smithsonian news of February 16, 2012, Mr. Van Vleck’s website had the history of email timeline as shown in (a). After the Smithsonian news (c. March 2012), Mr. Van Vleck changed the content to as shown in (b). (Nightingale and Song, 2014b)
6.2 Misuse #2: Ray Tomlinson Invented “Email” and Sent the First “Email” Message
The statements such as these:
“Ray Tomlinson invented email in 1971.” ("Ask.com - What's Your Question?", 2012)
“Ray Tomlinson sent the first email.” ("A Brief History of Email in the Federal Government.", 2012)
“Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. Like many of the Internet inventors, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor.” ("History of Internet/Email.", 2012)
misuse the term “email,” since Mr. Ray Tomlinson did not invent email --- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The invention referenced in these statement(s) and attributed to Tomlinson is the simple exchange of text messages between computers. Tomlinson simply modified a pre-existing program called SNDMSG, which he did not write, but made some minor modifications to, in order to enable the exchange of simple text messages across computers.
SNDMSG required a set of cryptic and highly technical computer codes to instruct the computer to transfer a message from one computer to another. Only trained technical personnel, such as computer scientists and technicians, not end users, such as a secretary or office worker with minimal to no computer knowledge, could use such a method. Tomlinson updated this previously existing SNDMSG command program to transmit text strings over a network connection. SNDMSG was not a system of interlocking parts designed for laypersons to manage routine office communications; thus, it was not designed to replicate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
As primary references show, SNDMSG was not only not email but also was just a very rudimentary form of text messaging (Vittal, 1981):
“The very simple systems (SNDMSG, RD, and READMAIL) did not integrate the reading and creation functions, had different user interfaces, and did not provide sufficient functionality for simple message processing.” (Vittal, 1981)
Moreover, Tomlinson, to his own admission, said his work was a “no-brainer” and was merely a minor contribution (Tomlinson, 2012):
“I was making improvements to the local inter-user mail program called SNDMSG. The idea occurred to me that CPYNET could append material to a mailbox file just as readily as SNDMSG could. SNDMSG could easily incorporate the code from CPYNET and direct messages through a network connection to remote mailboxes in addition to appending messages to local mailbox files. The missing piece was that the experimental CPYNET protocol had no provision for appending to a file; it could just send and receive files. Adding the missing piece was a no-brainer—just a minor addition to the protocol.” (Tomlinson, 2012).
Tomlinson’s work was in no manner comparable to the enterprise-class system that Ayyadurai developed at UMDNJ, that was a complete end user application consisting of 50,000 lines of code, built from the ground up, to create email --- the full-scale emulation of the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system in 1978.
What is also alarming, in this context, is that Michael Padlipsky's famous essay, originally linked on Van Vleck’s site, in which Padlipsky exposed Tomlinson’s conflated claim as being the “inventor of email,” (Padlipsky, 2000):
“I don't believe Ray Tomlinson invented ‘e-mail.’ And not because of the quibble that we called it netmail originally, though that does offer an excuse to observe that I personally find the term ‘e-mail’ awfully cutesy, and references to ‘sending an e-mail’ syntactic slime. Nor because of the semi-quibble that ‘mail’ had been around intra-Host on several of the Host operating systems since well before anybody realized they were Hosts, though that one has a great deal of abstract ‘historical’ appeal. No, it's because I have a completely clear memory that Ray wasn't even at the FTP meeting where we decided to add mail to the protocol.” (Padlipsky, 2000)
was deleted and removed by Van Vleck (Nightingale & Song 2014b), after the Smithsonian event. Van Vleck’s website used to link to Padlipsky’s article prior to the Smithsonian event.
Prior to the Smithsonian event, Van Vleck also questioned the claim that Tomlinson was the “inventor of email,”; however, after the Smithsonian event, Van Vleck, who by all indications had close and collegial relationships with members of the ARPANET community who were threatened by Ayyadurai’s facts exposing their false claims, changed his sardonic position of Mr. Tomlinson being the “inventor of email,” fell in line with the revised propaganda of Raytheon/BBN, after the Smithsonian event, to deem Tomlinson as the inventor of “network email,” a new term crafted to bequeath credit to the ARPANET community in the face of the mounting facts, following Ayyadurai’s documentation of inventing email in 1978.
6.3 Misuse #3: The Use of the “@” Symbol Equals the Invention of “Email”
The statement:
“When [Tomlinson] is remembered at all, it is as the man who picked ‘@’ as the locator symbol in electronic addresses. In truth though, he is the inventor of e-mail, the application that launched the digital information revolution. And yet the breakthrough he made was such a simple evolutionary step that hardly anyone noticed it till later.” (“The Invention of Email,” 1998)
misuses the term “email” since it implies that Ray Tomlinson’s use of the “@” symbol is equivalent to inventing email -- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The “@” symbol is used to separate the user name from the domain name. The invention referenced in the above statement is the use of the “@” symbol to distinguish two computers when sending a text message. The “@” symbol is not a necessary component of email -- the system of interlocking parts. In some cases “-at” was used (Van Vleck, 2012), or the “.” symbol as in the first email system developed by Ayyadurai.
“Because the ‘@’ was a line kill character in Multics, sending mail from Multics to other hosts used the control argument -at instead.” (Van Vleck, 2012)
Some have mistakenly characterized the “@” symbol as something very unique, “underused” and novel. As a point of fact, the “@” symbol was the linekill character on Multics, (Pogran, 2012), another early timesharing system, and created a character conflict for those Multics users trying to use Tomlinson's SNDMSG.
As Kenneth Pogran recalled:
“Do folks remember that ‘@’ was the Multics line-kill character? We were opposed to Ray Tomlinson's famous (or is it infamous?) selection of @ as the character that separated the user name from the host name…. Early versions … allowed the use of space-a-t-space (i.e., ‘at’) in place of the ‘@’ to accommodate Multics (and the mail composition software I wrote used the syntax -at on the command line)” (Pogran, 2012).
“Early versions of ARPANET email specs allowed the use of space-a-t-space (i.e., " at ") in place of the ‘@’ to accommodate Multics and the mail composition software I wrote used the syntax -at on the command line to begin composing an email….” (Pogran, 2012)
The “@” symbol was “underused” only to the extent that it interfered with some users' host environments. Equating of the “@” symbol with the invention of email was a result of the branding and marketing effort of Raytheon/BBN as obvious on their web site in 2012. After the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s documents, which began to expose the false claims of Raytheon/BBN (Padlipsky, 2000), Raytheon/BBN escalated their PR and marketing efforts as documented on the history of email section on http://www.inventorofemail.com. Raytheon/BBN, in fact, cleverly juxtaposed the “@” symbol with Tomlinson as their brand mascot, with the false claim that he “invented email”.
6.4 Misuse #4: RFCs Demonstrate “Email” Existed Prior To 1978
The statement:
“…email underpinnings were further cemented in 1977's RFC 733, a foundational document of what became the Internet itself.” (Biddle 2012)
misuses the term “email” since Requests for Comments (RFCs) were simply written documentation, not a computer program, nor software, nor email ---- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system.
RFCs were literally meeting notes following meetings by electronic messaging researchers. RFCs, such as RFC 733, were written documentation not a computer program or code or system. Moreover, statements such as, and others like it:
“In 1977 these features and others went from best practices to a binding standard in RFC 733.” (Biddle, 2012)
are hyperboles and conflation of RFCs.
Mr. Sam Biddle, neither a computer scientist nor a software developer, who wrote the statement referenced above, in an article in Gizmodo referencing Ayyadurai as an “asshole” and “dick,” is known for his puerile, sensationalist, and yellow journalism. For example, a few weeks after writing this outrageous article on Ayyadurai, Biddle wrote an article about a virtual Internet dog name “Boo,” which had died. It was later found out that “Boo” had not died. Anderson Cooper, a CNN journalist, later exposed Mr. Biddle’s quality of journalism on his TV news show “The Ridiculist.”
What is unfortunate is that even scholarly “historians,” like Mr. Thomas Haigh, a leader of the SIGCIS group, and others either purposely wanting to deny the facts of email’s origin from 1978 at UMDNJ, or unconsciously cutting and copying the Gizmodo article, believing Biddle’s sensationalistic article to be the truth, continue to use Biddle’s article as a primary and scholarly source reference to deny email’s invention by Ayyadurai in Newark, New Jersey. Such tabloid articles are referenced as the primary source on Wikipedia and some major media to attempt to perpetuate false assertions that RFCs are email, and predate Ayyadurai’s invention.
Specifically, RFC 733, for example, is a document that was drafted in November 1977, and was simply, at best, a specification attempting to provide a standardization of messaging protocols and interfaces. RFC 733 should not be conflated as “email underpinnings” (Biddle, 2012) and equated as email --- the electronic system of interlocking parts emulating the interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system created by Ayyadurai at UMDNJ in 1978.The RFC 733 is explicitly described as:
"This specification is intended strictly as a definition of what is to be passed between hosts on the ARPANET. It is NOT intended to dictate either features which systems on the Network are expected to support, or user interfaces to message creating or reading programs."
RFC 733 did not even dictate which features of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail process would be included, such as the basic components of the user interfaces for message creation and reading. Moreover, RFC 733 attempted to define a standard that was never even fully accepted nor implemented. (Crocker et al., 1977).
“Some of RFC #733's features failed to gain adequate acceptance.” (Crocker et al., 1977)
The very term “RFC” means “Request for Comments” and were typically lists, notes and at best specifications (Shicker, 1981) on what could be in the future, but were neither computer code nor software application, such as email, the system and software application developed by Ayyadurai.
“Prospective users, system designers, and service offering companies often compile lists of potential services [of electronic mail systems]… Nobody claims that these lists are complete, and most often it is admitted freely that these lists represent a first cut synthesis of services offered by other communication facilities. Unfortunately, these lists mostly convey just a number of buzz-words which everybody interprets in his own fashion.” (Shicker, 1981)
In summary, RFCs only proposed an interface for message format and transmission, but said little about feature sets of individual electronic messaging or mail systems. The RFCs’ authors, by their own admission, clearly state this was not their intention. RFCs were the definition of command-line terminology, at best, but certainly not email --- the system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
6.5 Misuse #5: Programs For Exchanging Messages Were “Email”
The statement:
“By the mid-1970s, other user-oriented e-mail programs arrived on the scene. Two of the more popular examples were ‘Hermes’ at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, now BBN—a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon — and ‘Laurel,’ which was in use at Xerox PARC.” (Crocker, 2012)
misuses the term “email” since programs like Hermes and Laurel were not email - -- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Laurel was really, in fact, a single component, front-end for the independent, lower-level Grapevine messaging platform (Schroeder, 1984).
“A client program of Grapevine generally obtains services through code…. The primary clients of Grapevine are various mail interface programs, of which Laurel is most widely used.” (Schroeder, 1984)
Though Laurel was beginning to incorporate some elements of the interlocked parts such as folders and the inbox, it was still like nearly all messaging systems of the period: heavily dependent on external system resources, and not designed as a system of interlocking parts to be a full-scale emulation of the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system.
Furthermore, internal Xerox documentation (Schroeder, 1984), such as:
“…the Grapevine system was first made available to a limited number of clients during 1980.” (Birrel, 1980)
shows that independent Grapevine component was still being prototyped with five dedicated servers in 1981, well after Ayyadurai’s invention of email (from 1978) which had been in use in routine communications at UMDNJ for several years by 1980. No word of Laurel or Grapevine, moreover, is publicly available until 1982 (Tesler, 2012). Larry Tesler, who worked at Xerox during 1973 to 1980 on the internal development of Laurel, acknowledges that he himself did not
“… know what if any email systems based on unofficial internet standards were implemented before 1979.” (Tesler 2012)
Tesler, however, was aware that Laurel was still under development in 1979 (Tesler, 2012), when the Xerox work would be published in the Communications of the ACM (Schroeder, 1984, Birrell, 1980).
Hermes was similar. It was not a system of interlocked parts and not something user-friendly that an ordinary office worker could use. Users had to learn about twenty commands to use it (Vallee, 1984):
“In systems like SEND MESSAGE and its successors, such as HERMES, ON-TYME, and COMET, there is no provision for immediate response. A message is sent into a mailbox for later access by the recipient. No automatic filing is provided: any searching of message files requires users to write their own search programs, and to flag those messages they want to retain or erase. The burden is placed on users to manage their own files, and a fairly detailed understanding of programming and file structures is required. Both senders and receivers must learn about 20 commands, and if they misuse them they can jeopardize the entire data structure. Some messages may even be lost in the process.” (Vallee, 1984)
Another program, PLATO, which was an invention for computer-assisted instruction, which some reference as “email,” also is best understood from Vallee’s comments, which also help to place in context PLATO relative to Ayyadurai’s invention (Vallee, 1984). In 1979, all known messaging systems were itemized in RFC 808 by the leading researchers who worked at the big universities, large companies and for the military (Postel, 1982b):
“Dave Farber gave a bit of history of mail systems listing names of all the systems that anybody had ever heard of (see Appendix A)…. It was noted that most of the mail systems were not formal projects (in the sense of explicitly sponsored research), but things that ‘just happened’.” (Postel, 1982b)
Note, Laurel and PLATO do not appear on this list in Postel’s “Appendix A” as late as 1982.
For a review of individual systems of the period, it is best to look at the 1979 RFC (‘IETF Tools’, 2012), which contains a listing of the names of all the computer mail systems anybody had ever heard of, at the time. The vast majority of the systems, itemized in this list, such as MSG, MS, SNDMSG, RD, and HERMES, all share a common ancestry, and inherit features (and deficiencies) from this heritage. John Vittal tried to distinguish the features and qualities of his MSG message system relative to its antecedents (Vittal, 1981):
MSG started from a set of primitive message processing operations. Several of the commands listed above were not implemented in the initial version of MSG:
Creation: Answer and Forward
Motion: Move
File operations: Write
Marking: Mark and Unmark
User-interface and Profile: Koncise, Verbose, and Zap profile
Miscellaneous: Print date and Comment
It became clear, even before MSG was first publicly released, that the operations of Put and Delete were so commonly used together that a combining operation (Move) should be included in the functionality of the system. This was the first major modification.
COMPARISON WITH OTHER SYSTEMS
Many of the other CBMSs of the time have already been alluded to. The very simple systems (SNDMSG, RD and READMAIL) did not integrate the reading and creation functions, had different user-interfaces, and did not provide sufficient functionality for simple message processing.
On the other hand, two systems came very close to MSG. BANANARD gained acceptance, but seemed to not have the right functionality. The user-interface seemed to be a little too verbose for experienced users. However, it is important to note that some users still prefer to use BANANARD. These tend to be users who view mail rather than respond to it.
In Vittal's conclusion, he was careful to stress the limitations of MSG as a general communications tool:
However good MSG is, it is not perfect. Its major drawback is that it does not have a directly integrated message creation facility with the same style of user-interface as the rest of MSG. The result is that users are forced to use two separate interfaces for a single conceptual process -- dealing with mail. In addition, the decision to use SNDMSG limits users because it has no way to edit various fields of the message after a specific field has been completely specified, especially address lists.
Vittal states,
“Its major drawback is that it does not have a directly integrated message creation facility….” (Vittal, 1981)
MSG was at best a rudimentary text messaging client. It was lightweight messaging system, designed to aid users of the TENEX operating system. It served its purpose well, but was crippled by a limited feature set, and was not email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, interlocked paperbased mail system.
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Re: Shiva Ayyadurai suing TechDirt over Stories Saying He Di
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Part 2 of 2
6.6 Misuse #6: Mail On CTSS Developed In 1960's Was “Email”
The statement:
misuses the term “email” since the reference to CTSS MAIL, the method referenced and attributed to MIT, was an early text messaging system, not a version of email --- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. This invention refers to the MAIL command on MIT’s CTSS timesharing system. The basic usage of MAIL, as documented in CTSS Programming Staff Note # 39 (Crisman et al., 2012), is below:
This invention, MAIL, was not a system of interlocked parts emulating the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. MAIL allowed a CTSS user to transmit a file, written in a third-party editor, and encoded in binary-decimal format (BCD), to other CTSS users.
The delivered message would be appended to the front of a file in the recipient’s directory that represented the aggregate of all received messages. This flatfile message storage placed strict constraints on the capacity of MAIL, and required users to traverse and review all messages one-by-one; search and sort mechanisms were not available. Corruption to the MAIL BOX file could result in the loss of a user’s messages. From the CTSS Programmer’s Guide, Section AH.9.05, (Crisman, 1965):
The design choices in MAIL—lack of search and sort facilities, need for an external editor, dependence on CTSS-specific user IDs, and flat-file message storage— put strict constraints on the use and capacity of the command. This was not email --- the system of interlocking parts, created to emulate the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system. MAIL was well-suited to the low-volume transmission of informal (i.e. unformatted) messages, at best, like text messaging of today.
The creator of MAIL admitted this fact:
The limited feature set of MAIL would be carried over to its progeny (SNDMSG, MSG, HERMES), creating headaches for even the most sophisticated technical staffers (Vallee, 1984):
Those who promoted MAIL as "email," when the term "email" did not even exist in 1965, are misusing the term "email" to refer to a command-driven program that transferred BCD-encoded text files, written in an external editor, among timesharing system users, to be reviewed serially in a flat-file.
One would be hard-pressed to draw a historical straight line from MAIL to today’s email systems. MAIL was not "email,” but a text messaging command line system, at best, and perhaps the predecessor to early forms of online discussion boards.
6.7 Misuse #7: In 2012, the Term “Email” Now Needs To Be Defined
This statement (made following news of Ayyadurai's invention of email in 2012, after the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s work):
serves to misuse and confuse the term email --- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system, since they conflate the term “electronic mail” with “email” by referencing Ray Tomlinson, Tom Van Vleck and David Crocker as “email pioneers.” Neither Tomlinson nor Van Vleck nor Crocker invented email --- the system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, which specifically Crocker had as of December 1977 concluded “impossible” to build.
Moreover, this attempt to provide a “specific definition” by Mr. Haigh in 2012, 34 years after email was precisely defined in 1978 by Ayyadurai, as the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, is historical revisionism. Mr. Haigh leads SIGCIS, which is a group of computer “historians” that denies the invention of email in 1978 at UMDNJ, in spite of the clear facts. Their disinformation and historical revisionism is based on equating “electronic messaging” with “email.” These “historians” had already written “email history,” prior to Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s artifacts on February 16, 2012.
The fact is “email” was already clearly defined in 1978 as the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, and formally recognized in 1982 by the issuance of the U.S. government’s issuance of the first Copyright for “Email” to Ayyadurai. Such an attempt to provide a revisionist definition of “email” by industry insiders, in 2012, served one purpose, to allow them: Tomlinson, Van Vleck and Crocker, who worked with the early messaging systems SNDMSG, MAIL and MS, respectively, to retroactively define their work as “email” so as to ensure their primacy to “email,” which they did not create, and had no intention of creating, while misappropriating credit from Ayyadurai.
The documentation of that period reveals that the term "email" did not exist prior to 1978. More importantly, the definition of the juxtaposed terms "electronic” and “mail," and a specification of its functions, was anything but clear-cut. In fact, prior to 1978, the term “electronic mail” and “electronic message” were used interchangeably to refer to the “electronification” of any type of text message, dating back to the telegraph of the 1800s.
Email, created by Ayyadurai in 1978, however, has a precise definition as the system of interlocking parts emulating the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Prior to Ayyadurai's invention, the confusion about the term “electronic mail” existed:
As Gordon B. Thompson of Bell Northern Research wrote in 1981 (Thompson, 1981):
Peter Schicker wrote of similar concerns of messaging service and feature lists (Schicker, 1981):
Even normally well-defined terms like “memo” and “conferencing” took on confusing, often conflicting meanings (Vallee, 1984):
Or, as James Robinson wrote in the opening lines of his master’s thesis on a review of electronic mail, messaging systems (Robinson, 1983):
The term “email,” however, has had a clear definition based on Ayyadurai's invention of email, the electronic emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, which he explicitly named “email.”
Therefore, any attempt, in 2012 to redefine it, is clearly an attempt to inappropriately assign “the inventor of email” moniker to those who are not the inventors of email.
6.8 Misuse #8: “Email” Is Not An Invention, But VisiCalc Is An Invention
The statements (in reference to VisiCalc being an invention but email not being an invention since):
and,
demonstrate ignorance on the fact that “email” is a system just as VisiCalc is a system and is a deliberate attempt to denigrate the significant contribution of Ayyadurai, who invented "email,” the system, which is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, consisting of the interlocked parts: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Attachments, etc.
Like VisiCalc, which was an electronic metaphor of the accounting paperbased ledger system, EMAIL, the first email system, also created an electronic metaphor for the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The accessibility of Ayyadurai’s invention of email was its essential attribute. It wasn’t a simple text messaging system inspired to support battlefield communications for soldiers, and usable only by highly trained technical personnel, with cryptic codes and commands. It embodied the definition of “email” as we define the word today. Along these lines, we should remember that Bill Gates, in the early years of Microsoft, stated that the company’s mission was to place a personal computer in every American home. Steven Jobs was determined to make a computer that could be bought in a box just like any other product. Consumers didn’t have to shop for components in various electronics stores. They didn’t have to do anything except plug the machine in and start using it. Microsoft and Apple were defined by the accessibility of their products.
Unquestionably, that was the real innovation on the part of Gates and Jobs. In just the same way, Ayyadurai’s 1978 application, EMAIL, invented email. It created something – a practical, user-friendly electronic communication system on the model of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system – that simply had never existed before, and one which experts of the time had thought “impossible.”
The absurdity of Haigh’s statements, therefore, is simply evidence of the bias of the SIGCIS “historians,” who in collusion with industry insiders, seek to misappropriate credit of Ayyadurai's invention of email. The assertion that email is not an invention, but that VisiCalc is an invention, assumes that the reader will acknowledge such illogic.
There is a clear analogy between the invention of EMAIL and the invention of VisiCalc. Bricklin’s title as the Father of the Modern Spreadsheet belies significant contributions to the field of data processing completed prior to the release of VisiCalc. It was the subject of Iveron and Brooks’s seminal Automatic Data Processing and a major research topic for industry and academia.
What Bricklin did was to create an integrated system for data processing, complete with a consistent user interface (UI) and a strong metaphor, which was targeted towards end users. Bricklin’s accomplishment wasn’t that he invented data processing, but that he integrated it and increased accessibility, just as Ayyadurai’s accomplishment wasn’t that he invented electronic messaging, but that he integrated and created a new electronic system for making the paper-based system of interoffice, inter-organizational communications accessible to ordinary office workers.
In the same way that Bricklin’s VisiCalc digitized the system of paper spreadsheets, Ayyadurai’s email digitized the interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system. Both took well-defined social processes, and gave them the power of computation, freeing users from the drudgery of manual recalculation in the former case, or the delivery of physical interoffice memos in the latter case.
This puts both projects in stark contrast to the messaging systems of early timesharing architecture, which evolved to address the administrative and technical needs of mainframe users. As stated in RFC 808, most of these message systems “were not formal projects (in the sense of explicitly sponsored research), but things that ‘just happened,’” and Jacques Vallee wrote of these early systems (Vallee, 1984):
The statement by the SIGCIS “historian,” part of the industry insider clique, has asserted, with reference to Ayyadurai's work that:
is simply a false, unscholarly, and denigrating statement.
This statement reveals deliberate and reckless ignorance of the facts, which are accessible now at the Smithsonian. EMAIL, the first email system, was designed as an integrated system—it included all its own facilities for message handling, distribution, composition, archival, and user management. It was “small scale” only in the sense that it did not need the ARPANET, in contrast to systems like MAIL and MSG, which leveraged a host of facilities in the host environment. EMAIL the program and system, consisted of nearly 50,000 lines of FORTRAN IV code, unlike Van Vleck’s MAIL command, which comprised less than 300 lines of MAD, a high-level language on the CTSS (Crisman et al., 2012).
EMAIL was far from a "small-scale electronic mail system." EMAIL was a full-scale emulation of the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, with all the features we now experience in modern email programs and many features, which some email programs even in the late 1990's, did not have.
What also needs to be investigated, by likely an independent professional ethics body, is the biased, unscholarly, and defamatory attacks on Ayyadurai (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012), and the clear conflict of interest, as exemplified in the list of individuals in Mr. Haigh’s “Acknowledgements” section thanking those who helped him in denigrating Ayyadurai:
A significant cluster or coalition of the individuals listed in the Acknowledgements have a direct and indirect, and/or close affiliation to Raytheon/BBN, who claims they “invented email,” as evident on their website (Raytheon/BBN, n.d.), which brandishes the ‘@’ logo with its numerous press and marketing releases claiming that it is the home of the “inventor of email,” Mr. Ray Tomlinson.
6.9 Misuse #9: Dec And Wang Created “Email”
The statement:
conflates all forms of electronic communication, from telegraph services, to Telex or CBMS systems with the email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. This conflation is confusing, and an attempt to equate the broad term “electronic mail,” dating back to the 1800s, with email, the system.
The offerings of “electronic mail” systems by private suppliers varied greatly, and were largely incompatible. Wang Laboratories, for example, had already been well established for its line of word processing equipment (Wang Systems Newsletter, 1979). When network facilities became readily available, it bolted on file transfer facilities to its machines, creating a line of “communicating word processors” (Trudell et al., 1984). This networking of word processors is not email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system.
In 1980, there was tremendous pressure to innovate in the “office automation sector.” However, as addressed in James Robinson’s 1983 thesis, “An Overview of Electronic Mail Systems” (Robinson, 1983), these offerings were part of a larger defensive strategy:
The "electronic mail" offerings by private industry in 1980 were not the system of interlocked parts emulating the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system. They were, at best, wildly unstable and inconsistent.
6.10 Misuse #10: Laurel Was “Email”
The statement:
is a misuse of the term email --- the system of interlocking parts which was the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The invention, Laurel, was a mail user interface program for the Xerox Alto. It was a graphical front-end to a series of messaging programs akin to SNDMSG and MS (Schroeder et al., 1984). The use of mouse was an innovation of its host environment Alto, not of Laurel itself (Alto User Handbook, 1979). Laurel was capable of basic message composition, scanning and flat-file storage (through the use of its *.mail files). Like other file-flat approaches, mail management remained in the hands of users (ALTO World Newsletter, 1979).
The Laurel Manual, as it existed at Stanford in September 1980 (Stanford, 1980) provided a thorough explanation of what Laurel was, and what its capabilities were. Laurel was just a user interface, and not the system of interlocked parts to emulate the entire interoffice paper mail system.
Laurel was disconnected and relied on "Piping" other small programs which were loosely connected to each other.
Mention of MSG in the official Laurel documentation refers to the same command program discussed earlier, created and critiqued by John Vittal, and listed in RFC 808 as running on a TENEX operating system. Maxc referred to a Xerox-produced machine that emulated the facilities of PDP-10 TENEX-based systems. Its operation is well documented (Fiala et al., 1974). It follows that Laurel, as it existed in 1979 and 1980, fundamentally depended on MSG and Maxc, for message transmission. It was an Alto-based front-end for a more pedestrian MSG program. Ironically, the revealing kinship of Laurel and MSG is well described in the 1979 Whole ALTO World Newsletter (ALTO World Newsletter, 1979). The sentence, “Eventually, the services of Laurel will surpass those of MSG, but at present, the two are roughly equivalent in function,” should not be overlooked.
The “distributed message system” mentioned in the Laurel Manual would eventually be realized in Grapevine, tested on a limited number of clients in 1980, and not publicly documented (‘ACM Transactions on Computer systems’, 1984) until 1982, well after Ayyadurai’s invention of email was well established in a production environment. Larry Tesler, who was at Xerox throughout Laurel’s development, corroborates these points (Tesler, 2012).
A review of period documentation helps to put Laurel in perspective. It was, as of 1979 and 1980, an Alto-based graphical front-end for MSG. It stood on the foundations of the beautifully sophisticated Alto environment, and contributed Alto- specific operations like menu picking and Bravo-type editing, which were not available in other MSG environments.
However, Laurel 2.0 provided only a small subset of the features available in Ayyadurai’s EMAIL, lacking an attachment editor, relational database, administrator/ postmaster functionality, prioritization and search tools, among others. The Alto was a brilliant machine, the precursor to the Apple machines, and Laurel would evolve to become a worthy Alto application. However, as of 1980, Laurel was not the state-of-the–art technology. Readers are encouraged to read the Laurel Manual for details.
6.11 Misuse #11: The Term “Email” Belongs To Compuserve
The statement:
is a misdirection to attempt to convince readers that the term “email” existed prior to the invention of email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The term “email” was created and coined by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai in 1978 at UMDNJ. Those five characters E-M-A-I-L were juxtaposed together to name the main subroutine of the first email system. Ayyadurai coined the term email for the idiosyncratic reason that in 1978 FORTRAN IV only allowed for a six-character maximum variable and subroutine naming convention, and the RTE-IV operating system had a five-character limit for program names.
By 1980, Ayyadurai’s email system was in production use at UMDNJ. Needless to say, EMAIL, the program, and its user manual were already in distribution around the UMDNJ campus. Email was a CompuServe trademark in 1983, but that remains a moot point for discussions of primacy. CompuServe applied for an EMAIL trademark on June 27, 1983, an effort that it abandoned in August 1984, likely because of the prior arte of email dating back to Ayyadurai’s Copyright in 1982. However, for the sake of clarity and transparency, two instances of CompuServe’s 1983 EMAIL advertising are included below:
Fig. 9. Taken from the January, 1983 Edition of Byte Magazine.
It’s important to note that CompuServe “popularized” the term ‘Email’ only to the extent that it triggered animosity and ridicule from system users; it was notoriously buggy and feature-light (Compuserve Information Service User’s Guide, 1983).
6.12 Misuse #12: “Email” Has No Single Inventor
The statement:
is a misuse of the term “email” --- the system of interlocking parts intended to be a full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. The individuals being referenced here as having been “email pioneers” and contributing the to the development of “email,” including Mr. Tomlinson, did not contribute to the development of email, but rudimentary systems for text messaging.
More importantly, this statement is an attempt to feign humility with a “collaborative spirit,” with the deliberate aim of isolating and dismissing Ayyadurai's singular and rightful position as the inventor of email. Ayyadurai did singularly create email, the system of interlocking parts emulating the entire interoffice, inter- organizational paper-based mail system.
The assertion that “email has no single inventor” and “email cannot be invented” are statements, which industry insiders began promoting after an article in the Washington Post appeared that “V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai honored as the inventor of email” (Kolawole, 2012).
For many decades, Raytheon's subsidiary, BBN, has been falsely promoting that it employs the "inventor of email," referring to Ray Tomlinson. Yet, prior to the ceremony to honor Ayyadurai's accomplishment and acquisition of the 50,000 lines of code, tapes, papers and artifacts documenting his invention, these insiders and the SIGCIS group did not expose or ever question the false statements attributing Mr. Tomlinson as “the inventor of email.”
Raytheon/BBN put a great deal of effort into their own branding as innovators, by claiming publicly that they are the “inventors of email.” This branding involves juxtaposing the “@” symbol with the face of Ray Tomlinson as the “inventor of email.” In fact, on Raytheon/BBN's home page, the word "innovation" is visually juxtaposed next to the @ logo, with Tomlinson's picture overlaid (Raytheon/BBN, n.d.).
After the Smithsonian ceremony of Ayyadurai’s invention, Raytheon/BBN sent press releases re-asserting that Tomlinson was the “inventor of email.” Concomitant with these efforts, as the timeline shows of attack on Ayyadurai (Abraham, 2014) industry insiders, supported by SIGCIS “historians,” Ray Tomlinson, BBN supporters, and ex-BBN employees continued to perpetuate a false history of email by discrediting Ayyadurai's invention as well as character assassinating him as an inventor and scientist. They used historical revisionism and confusion to redefine and misuse the term email. Through these efforts, they re-declared Tomlinson, and thereby the Raytheon/BBN brand, as the singular “inventor of email,” the “Godfather of email,” and the “King of email” (Hesse, 2012; Hicks, 2012).
One ex-BBNer, Dave Walden, though part of the Tomlinson coterie, acknowledged the following:
Walden recognized the misuse of the term "email" as the transmission of text messages between terminals, as was the case with the early messaging systems such as MAIL. This text-message transmission can signify nearly all forms of digital communication—facsimiles, communicating word processors, online bulletin board systems, instant messaging clients, and formal communication.
However, email has a very clear meaning, as established by Ayyadurai in 1978: it is the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. It includes all the features one expects from paper mail systems: memo composition, editing, drafts, sorting, archival, forwarding, reply, registered mail, return receipt, prioritization, security, delivery retries, undeliverable notifications, group lists, bulk distribution, and managerial/administrative functions. It had to be fault-tolerant, familiar, and universal. By this definition, Ayyadurai’s invention is the only instance in which this level of integration was first achieved, the same level we all experience nearly every other email products such as Gmail, Hotmail and others.
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Schroeder, Michael D., Andrew Birrell, and Roger Needham (1984). "Experience with Grapevine: The Growth of a Distributed System." ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2.1, 3-23.
Shicker, P. "Service Definitions in a Computer Based Mail Environment” Computer Message Systems. Ottawa, Canada: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1981. 159-171.
Smith, C. (2011, August 30). ‘ “Email” Anniversary: V.A. Shiva's EMAIL Copyright Issued August 30, 1982’, Huffington Post.
Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (2012, February 16). Artifacts of Invention of Email from V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai’s 1978 Invention. Submitted to Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History. 10th Street & Constitution Ave. NW, in Washington, D.C. 20560.
Stanford Department of Computer Science & Xerox Corporation (1980 September). Welcome to ALTO Land. Stanford ALTO User’s Manual. Department of Computer Science, Stanford University.
Tesler, Larry (2012). Retrieved from http://tinyurl.com/83nlq32 on April 7, 2012.
Thompson, G.A. (1981) What’s the Message. Computer Message Systems. pp. 1-6. Ottawa, Canada: North-Holland Publishing Company.Tomlinson (2012).http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/fi ... frame.html, retrieved April 7, 2012
Trudell, L. et al. (1984) Options for electronic mail. Distributed Electronic Mail Networks. p. 67. White Plains, NY: Knowledge Industry Publications.
Tsuei, H. T. (2003). U.S. Patent No. 6,654,779. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Van Vleck, T. (2001) “The History of Electronic Mail,” http://web.archive.org/web/201107202154 ... ailhistory. html, (retrieved April 2012.)
Vallee, Jacques (1984). Computer Message Systems. New York: McGraw-Hill .
Vittal, John (1981). MSG: A Simple Message System. Cambridge, MA: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1981.
Wang Systems Newsletter 14 (1979 July).Whole ALTO World Newsletter (1977 December 31).
Westinghouse Science Talent Search (1981, January 21), ‘Software Design, Development and Implementation of High Reliability, Network-Wide, Electronic Mail System’, The 40th Annual Science Talent Search for the Westinghouse Science Scholarships and Awards: 1981 Honors Group, Science Service, Washington, DC.
Yates, J. (1989) ‘The Emergence of the Memo as a Managerial Genre’, Management Communication Quarterly, Vol. 2, pp. 485-510.
Yates, J. and Orlikowski, W. (1992) ‘Genres of Organizational Communication: A Structurational Approach to Studying Communication and Media’, Academy of Management Review, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 299-326.
_______________
Notes:
Deborah J. Nightingale
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
email: dnight@mit.edu
Sen Song
Tsinghua University, School of Medicine
Beijing, Haidian, China
Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field
Rutgers University, High Performance Computing, Information Services & Technology
Newark, NJ 07103, USA
6.6 Misuse #6: Mail On CTSS Developed In 1960's Was “Email”
The statement:
“Electronic mail, or email, was introduced at MIT in 1965 and was widely discussed in the press during the 1970s. Tens of thousands of users were swapping messages by 1980.” (Crisman et al., 2012)
misuses the term “email” since the reference to CTSS MAIL, the method referenced and attributed to MIT, was an early text messaging system, not a version of email --- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. This invention refers to the MAIL command on MIT’s CTSS timesharing system. The basic usage of MAIL, as documented in CTSS Programming Staff Note # 39 (Crisman et al., 2012), is below:
The MAIL Command
A new command should be written to allow a user to send a private message to another user which may be delivered at the receiver's convenience. This will be useful for the system to notify a user that some or all of his files have been backed-up. It will also be useful for users to send authors any criticisms.
MAIL LETTER FILE USER1 USER2 USER3 .... MAIL 'ME'
LETTER FILE is the name of a BCD file which contains the message to be sent.
USERn is the designation of the user who is to receive the message. USERn may be a programmer's name or programmer number or the problem-programmer number. It may also be just the problem number if the message is to go to all users of the same problem number.
MAIL ME is the command given by the receiver when he wants the mail to be printed. The files will be left in permanent mode and should be deleted by the receiver at his convenience.
The MAIL command will create or append to the front of a file called MAIL BOX. System messages to the user will be placed in a file called URGENT MAIL. The LOGIN command will notify the user if he has either kind of mail. MAIL ME will always print URGENT MAIL before MAIL BOX.
This invention, MAIL, was not a system of interlocked parts emulating the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. MAIL allowed a CTSS user to transmit a file, written in a third-party editor, and encoded in binary-decimal format (BCD), to other CTSS users.
The delivered message would be appended to the front of a file in the recipient’s directory that represented the aggregate of all received messages. This flatfile message storage placed strict constraints on the capacity of MAIL, and required users to traverse and review all messages one-by-one; search and sort mechanisms were not available. Corruption to the MAIL BOX file could result in the loss of a user’s messages. From the CTSS Programmer’s Guide, Section AH.9.05, (Crisman, 1965):
BOX'. Because of the appending feature of the MAILing process, the command 'DELETE MAIL BOX' should be issued after a message has been PRINTed, to avoid having to run through previous messages to get to the latest one.)
The design choices in MAIL—lack of search and sort facilities, need for an external editor, dependence on CTSS-specific user IDs, and flat-file message storage— put strict constraints on the use and capacity of the command. This was not email --- the system of interlocking parts, created to emulate the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system. MAIL was well-suited to the low-volume transmission of informal (i.e. unformatted) messages, at best, like text messaging of today.
The creator of MAIL admitted this fact:
“The proposed uses [of MAIL],” wrote Tom Van Vleck, “were communication from ‘the system’ to users, informing them that files had been backed up, communication to the authors of commands with criticisms, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.” (Crisman, 1965)
The limited feature set of MAIL would be carried over to its progeny (SNDMSG, MSG, HERMES), creating headaches for even the most sophisticated technical staffers (Vallee, 1984):
In systems like SEND MESSAGE and its successors, such as HERMES, ON-TYME, and COMET, there is no provision for immediate response. A message is sent into a mailbox for later access by the recipient. No automatic filing is provided: Any searching of message files requires users to write their own search programs, and to flag those messages they want to retain or erase. The burden is placed on users to manage their own files, and a fairly detailed understanding of programming and file structures is required. Both senders and receivers must learn about 20 commands, and if they misuse them they can jeopardize the entire data structure. Some messages may even be lost in the process. These drawbacks are compensated for by the fact that the cost per message is very low.
Those who promoted MAIL as "email," when the term "email" did not even exist in 1965, are misusing the term "email" to refer to a command-driven program that transferred BCD-encoded text files, written in an external editor, among timesharing system users, to be reviewed serially in a flat-file.
One would be hard-pressed to draw a historical straight line from MAIL to today’s email systems. MAIL was not "email,” but a text messaging command line system, at best, and perhaps the predecessor to early forms of online discussion boards.
6.7 Misuse #7: In 2012, the Term “Email” Now Needs To Be Defined
This statement (made following news of Ayyadurai's invention of email in 2012, after the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s work):
“… we need a more specific definition that captures the essence of computer based electronic mail as it actually emerged. Here is one that was developed in discussion with email pioneers Ray Tomlinson, Tom Van Vleck and Dave Crocker:
‘Electronic mail is a service provided by computer programs to send unstructured textual messages of about the same length as paper letters from the account of one user to recipients' personal electronic mailboxes, where they are stored for later retrieval.’ ” (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012)
serves to misuse and confuse the term email --- the system of interlocking parts which is the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system, since they conflate the term “electronic mail” with “email” by referencing Ray Tomlinson, Tom Van Vleck and David Crocker as “email pioneers.” Neither Tomlinson nor Van Vleck nor Crocker invented email --- the system of interlocking parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, which specifically Crocker had as of December 1977 concluded “impossible” to build.
Moreover, this attempt to provide a “specific definition” by Mr. Haigh in 2012, 34 years after email was precisely defined in 1978 by Ayyadurai, as the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, is historical revisionism. Mr. Haigh leads SIGCIS, which is a group of computer “historians” that denies the invention of email in 1978 at UMDNJ, in spite of the clear facts. Their disinformation and historical revisionism is based on equating “electronic messaging” with “email.” These “historians” had already written “email history,” prior to Smithsonian’s acquisition of Ayyadurai’s artifacts on February 16, 2012.
The fact is “email” was already clearly defined in 1978 as the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, and formally recognized in 1982 by the issuance of the U.S. government’s issuance of the first Copyright for “Email” to Ayyadurai. Such an attempt to provide a revisionist definition of “email” by industry insiders, in 2012, served one purpose, to allow them: Tomlinson, Van Vleck and Crocker, who worked with the early messaging systems SNDMSG, MAIL and MS, respectively, to retroactively define their work as “email” so as to ensure their primacy to “email,” which they did not create, and had no intention of creating, while misappropriating credit from Ayyadurai.
The documentation of that period reveals that the term "email" did not exist prior to 1978. More importantly, the definition of the juxtaposed terms "electronic” and “mail," and a specification of its functions, was anything but clear-cut. In fact, prior to 1978, the term “electronic mail” and “electronic message” were used interchangeably to refer to the “electronification” of any type of text message, dating back to the telegraph of the 1800s.
Email, created by Ayyadurai in 1978, however, has a precise definition as the system of interlocking parts emulating the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Prior to Ayyadurai's invention, the confusion about the term “electronic mail” existed:
As Gordon B. Thompson of Bell Northern Research wrote in 1981 (Thompson, 1981):
Electronic Mail Systems give me some major concern. The use of the word "mail" brings with it a lot of baggage, and most certainly people are going to get some surprises because of this. A conventional letter always presents itself to the reader in the same format as it had when it left the writer. In the electronic situation, unless rigid controls are exercised over the terminals allowed on the system, there is no guarantee that the recipient will see the same lay out at all. Designers tell us that the way text is presented can significantly alter the attitude the reader has towards printed text. In electronic mail this variable is left wide open!
Peter Schicker wrote of similar concerns of messaging service and feature lists (Schicker, 1981):
Users of such computer based mail systems are less intrigued by the various internal mechanisms and resource allocation strategies but require exact definitions of the facilities and services that these systems offer. Prospective users, system designers, and service offering companies often compile lists of potential services, e.g., like the list shown in appendix A. Nobody claims that these lists are complete and most often it is admitted freely that these lists represent a first cut synthesis of services offered by other communication facilities (e.g., postal service, telephone, telegraph, telex, etc.).
Unfortunately, these lists mostly convey just a number of buzz-words which everybody interprets in his own fashion. For example, a multitudiness of ...
Even normally well-defined terms like “memo” and “conferencing” took on confusing, often conflicting meanings (Vallee, 1984):
... sary obstacle. Much confusion still exists about the requirements for effective communications. One person calls "conferencing" what another calls "mail."
Or, as James Robinson wrote in the opening lines of his master’s thesis on a review of electronic mail, messaging systems (Robinson, 1983):
'Electronic Mail' is a term that means different things to different people. To one person, electronic mail may represent a technology as old as the telegraph, while to another, it may mean high-powered computers that relay digitized information. Part of the confusion about what electronic mail really is can be traced to how the term is defined. Usually, electronic mail is defined as any process ...
The term “email,” however, has had a clear definition based on Ayyadurai's invention of email, the electronic emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, which he explicitly named “email.”
Therefore, any attempt, in 2012 to redefine it, is clearly an attempt to inappropriately assign “the inventor of email” moniker to those who are not the inventors of email.
6.8 Misuse #8: “Email” Is Not An Invention, But VisiCalc Is An Invention
The statements (in reference to VisiCalc being an invention but email not being an invention since):
“To ‘invent’ something you have to devise some kind of new technology or capability that had not existed before. A computer program is not invented; it is ‘written’ or ‘developed.’ So, for example, it would make sense to say that Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented the spreadsheet when they wrote Visicalc. It wouldn’t make sense to say that Google invented the web browser when it developed Google Chrome, as many previous browsers existed, or even that it ‘invented the world’s first Google Chrome’ as that is a specific system rather than a technology.” (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012).
and,
“The system [created by Ayyadurai] will still be of interest to historians as a representative example of a low-budget, small scale electronic mail system constructed from off-the-shelf components, including the HP/1000’s communications, word processing, and database programs.” (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012)
demonstrate ignorance on the fact that “email” is a system just as VisiCalc is a system and is a deliberate attempt to denigrate the significant contribution of Ayyadurai, who invented "email,” the system, which is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, consisting of the interlocked parts: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Attachments, etc.
Like VisiCalc, which was an electronic metaphor of the accounting paperbased ledger system, EMAIL, the first email system, also created an electronic metaphor for the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The accessibility of Ayyadurai’s invention of email was its essential attribute. It wasn’t a simple text messaging system inspired to support battlefield communications for soldiers, and usable only by highly trained technical personnel, with cryptic codes and commands. It embodied the definition of “email” as we define the word today. Along these lines, we should remember that Bill Gates, in the early years of Microsoft, stated that the company’s mission was to place a personal computer in every American home. Steven Jobs was determined to make a computer that could be bought in a box just like any other product. Consumers didn’t have to shop for components in various electronics stores. They didn’t have to do anything except plug the machine in and start using it. Microsoft and Apple were defined by the accessibility of their products.
Unquestionably, that was the real innovation on the part of Gates and Jobs. In just the same way, Ayyadurai’s 1978 application, EMAIL, invented email. It created something – a practical, user-friendly electronic communication system on the model of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system – that simply had never existed before, and one which experts of the time had thought “impossible.”
The absurdity of Haigh’s statements, therefore, is simply evidence of the bias of the SIGCIS “historians,” who in collusion with industry insiders, seek to misappropriate credit of Ayyadurai's invention of email. The assertion that email is not an invention, but that VisiCalc is an invention, assumes that the reader will acknowledge such illogic.
There is a clear analogy between the invention of EMAIL and the invention of VisiCalc. Bricklin’s title as the Father of the Modern Spreadsheet belies significant contributions to the field of data processing completed prior to the release of VisiCalc. It was the subject of Iveron and Brooks’s seminal Automatic Data Processing and a major research topic for industry and academia.
What Bricklin did was to create an integrated system for data processing, complete with a consistent user interface (UI) and a strong metaphor, which was targeted towards end users. Bricklin’s accomplishment wasn’t that he invented data processing, but that he integrated it and increased accessibility, just as Ayyadurai’s accomplishment wasn’t that he invented electronic messaging, but that he integrated and created a new electronic system for making the paper-based system of interoffice, inter-organizational communications accessible to ordinary office workers.
In the same way that Bricklin’s VisiCalc digitized the system of paper spreadsheets, Ayyadurai’s email digitized the interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system. Both took well-defined social processes, and gave them the power of computation, freeing users from the drudgery of manual recalculation in the former case, or the delivery of physical interoffice memos in the latter case.
This puts both projects in stark contrast to the messaging systems of early timesharing architecture, which evolved to address the administrative and technical needs of mainframe users. As stated in RFC 808, most of these message systems “were not formal projects (in the sense of explicitly sponsored research), but things that ‘just happened,’” and Jacques Vallee wrote of these early systems (Vallee, 1984):
The human factors of communications are still largely ignored. As new companies get into the field, they hire the best programmers they can find to implement message systems. These programmers are often compiler writers or experts in operating systems and have had no experience in dealing with end users. They have operated in a completely different environment, where communications had a much narrower meaning. Some early successes have also had the unfortunate result of freezing the technical reality of the field for too long. Network mail on the ARPANET is a case in point. Introduced in the early 1970s, electronic mail systems have been very successful on the ARPANET, where they served a highly trained community of technical experts. When it came time to design new systems for wider communities, these same technical experts found it very difficult to be creative in ways that differed from what they had first learned.
The statement by the SIGCIS “historian,” part of the industry insider clique, has asserted, with reference to Ayyadurai's work that:
“The system will still be of interest to historians as a representative example of a low-budget, small scale electronic mail system constructed from off-the-shelf components, including the HP/1000’s communications, word processing, and database programs.” (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012).
is simply a false, unscholarly, and denigrating statement.
This statement reveals deliberate and reckless ignorance of the facts, which are accessible now at the Smithsonian. EMAIL, the first email system, was designed as an integrated system—it included all its own facilities for message handling, distribution, composition, archival, and user management. It was “small scale” only in the sense that it did not need the ARPANET, in contrast to systems like MAIL and MSG, which leveraged a host of facilities in the host environment. EMAIL the program and system, consisted of nearly 50,000 lines of FORTRAN IV code, unlike Van Vleck’s MAIL command, which comprised less than 300 lines of MAD, a high-level language on the CTSS (Crisman et al., 2012).
EMAIL was far from a "small-scale electronic mail system." EMAIL was a full-scale emulation of the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, with all the features we now experience in modern email programs and many features, which some email programs even in the late 1990's, did not have.
What also needs to be investigated, by likely an independent professional ethics body, is the biased, unscholarly, and defamatory attacks on Ayyadurai (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012), and the clear conflict of interest, as exemplified in the list of individuals in Mr. Haigh’s “Acknowledgements” section thanking those who helped him in denigrating Ayyadurai:
“Acknowledgements: Thanks to the dozens of people who sent me hundreds of messages after learning that I was working on a response for the Post. Many helped to read and shape earlier drafts. In no particular order: Evan Koblentz, Catherine Lathwell, Peter Meyer, Dave Walden, Debbie Deutsch, Marie Hicks, James Sumner, Ken Pogran, Tom Van Vleck, Dag Spicer, Mark Weber, JoAnne Yates, Murray Turoff, Al Kossow, Ramesh Subramanian, David Alan Grier, Paul McJones, Nathan Ensmenger, David Hemmendinger, Jeffrey Yost, David Moran, Peggy Kidwell, Debbie Douglas, Alex Bochannek, Bill McMillan, Len Shustek, Petri Paju, Elizabeth Finler, Dave Crocker, Ray Tomlinson, Pierre Mounier Kuhn, James P.G. Sterbenz, Ben Barker, Jim Cortada, and Craig Partridge.” (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012)
A significant cluster or coalition of the individuals listed in the Acknowledgements have a direct and indirect, and/or close affiliation to Raytheon/BBN, who claims they “invented email,” as evident on their website (Raytheon/BBN, n.d.), which brandishes the ‘@’ logo with its numerous press and marketing releases claiming that it is the home of the “inventor of email,” Mr. Ray Tomlinson.
6.9 Misuse #9: Dec And Wang Created “Email”
The statement:
“By 1980, electronic mail systems aimed at the office environments were readily available from companies such as DEC, Wang, and IBM.” (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012)
conflates all forms of electronic communication, from telegraph services, to Telex or CBMS systems with the email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. This conflation is confusing, and an attempt to equate the broad term “electronic mail,” dating back to the 1800s, with email, the system.
The offerings of “electronic mail” systems by private suppliers varied greatly, and were largely incompatible. Wang Laboratories, for example, had already been well established for its line of word processing equipment (Wang Systems Newsletter, 1979). When network facilities became readily available, it bolted on file transfer facilities to its machines, creating a line of “communicating word processors” (Trudell et al., 1984). This networking of word processors is not email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, interorganizational paper-based mail system.
In 1980, there was tremendous pressure to innovate in the “office automation sector.” However, as addressed in James Robinson’s 1983 thesis, “An Overview of Electronic Mail Systems” (Robinson, 1983), these offerings were part of a larger defensive strategy:
“[Computer-based message systems] are sold to users who have an interest in implementing electronic mail on their current equipment. Not surprising therefore, many of the vendors in this grouping tend to be minicomputer manufacturers such as Data General and Prime. The reason for this is not so much that minicomputer manufacturers have a real interest in electronic mail, but rather have devised messaging systems in an attempt to prevent other firms from selling a system that would run on their hardware. Thus, this type of electronic mail system has evolved as part of a defensive strategy by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). An excellent example of a product by an OEM is Wang Laboratories Inc.’s Mailway” (Wang Systems Newsletter, 1979)
The "electronic mail" offerings by private industry in 1980 were not the system of interlocked parts emulating the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paperbased mail system. They were, at best, wildly unstable and inconsistent.
6.10 Misuse #10: Laurel Was “Email”
The statement:
"...the PARC email software, Laurel, ran on the user’s local computer, was operated with a mouse, and pulled messages from the PARC server to a personal hard drive for storage and filing." (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012)
is a misuse of the term email --- the system of interlocking parts which was the full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The invention, Laurel, was a mail user interface program for the Xerox Alto. It was a graphical front-end to a series of messaging programs akin to SNDMSG and MS (Schroeder et al., 1984). The use of mouse was an innovation of its host environment Alto, not of Laurel itself (Alto User Handbook, 1979). Laurel was capable of basic message composition, scanning and flat-file storage (through the use of its *.mail files). Like other file-flat approaches, mail management remained in the hands of users (ALTO World Newsletter, 1979).
The Laurel Manual, as it existed at Stanford in September 1980 (Stanford, 1980) provided a thorough explanation of what Laurel was, and what its capabilities were. Laurel was just a user interface, and not the system of interlocked parts to emulate the entire interoffice paper mail system.
Laurel was disconnected and relied on "Piping" other small programs which were loosely connected to each other.
Mention of MSG in the official Laurel documentation refers to the same command program discussed earlier, created and critiqued by John Vittal, and listed in RFC 808 as running on a TENEX operating system. Maxc referred to a Xerox-produced machine that emulated the facilities of PDP-10 TENEX-based systems. Its operation is well documented (Fiala et al., 1974). It follows that Laurel, as it existed in 1979 and 1980, fundamentally depended on MSG and Maxc, for message transmission. It was an Alto-based front-end for a more pedestrian MSG program. Ironically, the revealing kinship of Laurel and MSG is well described in the 1979 Whole ALTO World Newsletter (ALTO World Newsletter, 1979). The sentence, “Eventually, the services of Laurel will surpass those of MSG, but at present, the two are roughly equivalent in function,” should not be overlooked.
The “distributed message system” mentioned in the Laurel Manual would eventually be realized in Grapevine, tested on a limited number of clients in 1980, and not publicly documented (‘ACM Transactions on Computer systems’, 1984) until 1982, well after Ayyadurai’s invention of email was well established in a production environment. Larry Tesler, who was at Xerox throughout Laurel’s development, corroborates these points (Tesler, 2012).
A review of period documentation helps to put Laurel in perspective. It was, as of 1979 and 1980, an Alto-based graphical front-end for MSG. It stood on the foundations of the beautifully sophisticated Alto environment, and contributed Alto- specific operations like menu picking and Bravo-type editing, which were not available in other MSG environments.
However, Laurel 2.0 provided only a small subset of the features available in Ayyadurai’s EMAIL, lacking an attachment editor, relational database, administrator/ postmaster functionality, prioritization and search tools, among others. The Alto was a brilliant machine, the precursor to the Apple machines, and Laurel would evolve to become a worthy Alto application. However, as of 1980, Laurel was not the state-of-the–art technology. Readers are encouraged to read the Laurel Manual for details.
6.11 Misuse #11: The Term “Email” Belongs To Compuserve
The statement:
“For years CompuServe users could type “GO EMAIL’ to read their messages….” (Compuserve Information Service User’s Guide, 1983)
is a misdirection to attempt to convince readers that the term “email” existed prior to the invention of email --- the system of interlocked parts intended to emulate the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.
The term “email” was created and coined by V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai in 1978 at UMDNJ. Those five characters E-M-A-I-L were juxtaposed together to name the main subroutine of the first email system. Ayyadurai coined the term email for the idiosyncratic reason that in 1978 FORTRAN IV only allowed for a six-character maximum variable and subroutine naming convention, and the RTE-IV operating system had a five-character limit for program names.
By 1980, Ayyadurai’s email system was in production use at UMDNJ. Needless to say, EMAIL, the program, and its user manual were already in distribution around the UMDNJ campus. Email was a CompuServe trademark in 1983, but that remains a moot point for discussions of primacy. CompuServe applied for an EMAIL trademark on June 27, 1983, an effort that it abandoned in August 1984, likely because of the prior arte of email dating back to Ayyadurai’s Copyright in 1982. However, for the sake of clarity and transparency, two instances of CompuServe’s 1983 EMAIL advertising are included below:
This is called interactive video and is the future of the computer networks.
Both The Source and Compuserve (the two largest computer networks) are beginning to tap the wellspring of interactive video. Both began their services by offering electronic mail (called EMAIL on Compuserve and SMAIL on The Source), which meant you were no longer at the mercy of the Postal Service if your addressee was also hooked into the computer revolution.
Quick and easy-to-learn areas allow you to type in a message to anyone else on the network. And, your message is delivered in a few moments, or a couple of hours at most.
SIGs, or Special Interest Groups, is an area that has been pioneered by Compuserve, although The Source is now offering a "Participate" program that is similar. In a SIG, a person leaves a message about that group's interest, or he replied ...
Fig. 8. Taken from the August, 1983 Edition of Popular Mechanics Magazine, pg. 107.
LAST NIGHT WE EXCHANGED LETTERS WITH MOM, THEN HAD A PARTY FOR ELEVEN PEOPLE IN NINE DIFFERENT STATES AND ONLY HAD TO WASH ONE GLASS ...
That's CompuServe, The Personal Communications Network For Every Computer Owner
And it doesn't matter what kind of computer you own. You'll use CompuServe's Electronic Mail system (we call it Email") to compose, edit and send letters to friends or business associates. The system delivers any number of messages to other users anywhere in North America.
CompuServe's multi-channel CB simulator brings distant friends together and gets new friendships started. You can even use a scrambler if you have a secret you don't want to share. Special interest groups meet regularly to trade information on hardware, software and hobbies from photography to cooking and you can sell, swap and post personal notices on the bulletin board.
There's all this and much more on the CompuServe Information Service. All you need is a computer, a modem, and CompuServe. CompuServe connects with almost any type or brand of personal computer or terminal and many communicating word processors. To receive an illustrated guide to CompuServe and learn how you can subscribe, contact or call:
CompuServe
Information Service Division, P.O. Box 20212 5000 Arlington Centre Blvd., Columbus, OH 43220
800-848-8990
In Ohio call 614-457-8650
An H&R Block Company
BYTE January 1983
Fig. 9. Taken from the January, 1983 Edition of Byte Magazine.
It’s important to note that CompuServe “popularized” the term ‘Email’ only to the extent that it triggered animosity and ridicule from system users; it was notoriously buggy and feature-light (Compuserve Information Service User’s Guide, 1983).
6.12 Misuse #12: “Email” Has No Single Inventor
The statement:
"Email has no single inventor. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of people who contributed to significant incremental ‘firsts’ in the development of email as we know it today. Theirs was a collective accomplishment, and theirs is a quiet pride (or at least was until recent press coverage provoked them). Email pioneer Ray Tomlinson has said of email’s invention that, ‘Any single development is stepping on the heels of the previous one and is so closely followed by the next that most advances are obscured. I think that few individuals will be remembered.’” (Crocker, 2012)
is a misuse of the term “email” --- the system of interlocking parts intended to be a full-scale emulation of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. The individuals being referenced here as having been “email pioneers” and contributing the to the development of “email,” including Mr. Tomlinson, did not contribute to the development of email, but rudimentary systems for text messaging.
More importantly, this statement is an attempt to feign humility with a “collaborative spirit,” with the deliberate aim of isolating and dismissing Ayyadurai's singular and rightful position as the inventor of email. Ayyadurai did singularly create email, the system of interlocking parts emulating the entire interoffice, inter- organizational paper-based mail system.
The assertion that “email has no single inventor” and “email cannot be invented” are statements, which industry insiders began promoting after an article in the Washington Post appeared that “V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai honored as the inventor of email” (Kolawole, 2012).
For many decades, Raytheon's subsidiary, BBN, has been falsely promoting that it employs the "inventor of email," referring to Ray Tomlinson. Yet, prior to the ceremony to honor Ayyadurai's accomplishment and acquisition of the 50,000 lines of code, tapes, papers and artifacts documenting his invention, these insiders and the SIGCIS group did not expose or ever question the false statements attributing Mr. Tomlinson as “the inventor of email.”
Raytheon/BBN put a great deal of effort into their own branding as innovators, by claiming publicly that they are the “inventors of email.” This branding involves juxtaposing the “@” symbol with the face of Ray Tomlinson as the “inventor of email.” In fact, on Raytheon/BBN's home page, the word "innovation" is visually juxtaposed next to the @ logo, with Tomlinson's picture overlaid (Raytheon/BBN, n.d.).
After the Smithsonian ceremony of Ayyadurai’s invention, Raytheon/BBN sent press releases re-asserting that Tomlinson was the “inventor of email.” Concomitant with these efforts, as the timeline shows of attack on Ayyadurai (Abraham, 2014) industry insiders, supported by SIGCIS “historians,” Ray Tomlinson, BBN supporters, and ex-BBN employees continued to perpetuate a false history of email by discrediting Ayyadurai's invention as well as character assassinating him as an inventor and scientist. They used historical revisionism and confusion to redefine and misuse the term email. Through these efforts, they re-declared Tomlinson, and thereby the Raytheon/BBN brand, as the singular “inventor of email,” the “Godfather of email,” and the “King of email” (Hesse, 2012; Hicks, 2012).
One ex-BBNer, Dave Walden, though part of the Tomlinson coterie, acknowledged the following:
"Naturally this was discussed on the ex-BBN list. In my view, this "new guy" [Shiva Ayyadurai] has described something not quite like what the rest of us understand when we say ‘email.’" (‘SIGCIS Blog’, 2012)
Walden recognized the misuse of the term "email" as the transmission of text messages between terminals, as was the case with the early messaging systems such as MAIL. This text-message transmission can signify nearly all forms of digital communication—facsimiles, communicating word processors, online bulletin board systems, instant messaging clients, and formal communication.
However, email has a very clear meaning, as established by Ayyadurai in 1978: it is the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. It includes all the features one expects from paper mail systems: memo composition, editing, drafts, sorting, archival, forwarding, reply, registered mail, return receipt, prioritization, security, delivery retries, undeliverable notifications, group lists, bulk distribution, and managerial/administrative functions. It had to be fault-tolerant, familiar, and universal. By this definition, Ayyadurai’s invention is the only instance in which this level of integration was first achieved, the same level we all experience nearly every other email products such as Gmail, Hotmail and others.
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Notes:
Deborah J. Nightingale
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
email: dnight@mit.edu
Sen Song
Tsinghua University, School of Medicine
Beijing, Haidian, China
Leslie P. Michelson, Robert Field
Rutgers University, High Performance Computing, Information Services & Technology
Newark, NJ 07103, USA
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