The Invention of Email by a 14-Year Old in Newark, NJ in 1978

Noam Chomsky Speaks to the Terminology of “Email”

Cambridge, Mass., June 12, 2012 - It is heartening to hear that the exposition of facts on the
publicly available web site, http://www.inventorofemail.com is helping the public validate that a
14-year-old boy invented email in 1978, while working in Newark, NJ. What continue 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.

In languages such as FORTRAN IV, it was conventional and a well-known fact that names of
programs, variables and subroutines were typically written in upper case --- thus the convention
of "EMAIL" to refer to the main subroutine name of the program VA Shiva Ayyadurai developed.
By the source code submitted to the US Copyright Office and by the documents provided to the
Smithsonian, email's intention and origin was to replicate electronically the interoffice, inter-
organizational mail system. These are indisputable facts, as I have referred to in my earlier
statement.

Note by the Copyright Act of 1976, once a work is in publication it is protected. In 1978, “email”
was first coined and used by Shiva to name his program. According to the Oxford English
Dictionary, in modern times, the date of origin of email is 1979, except for an old English
reference to mean enamel in the 1500's. The Merriam-Webster has the date of origin as 1982.
Note Shiva, received his formal Copyright registration in 1982.

As late as December 1977, Mr. David Crocker, one of Shiva's detractors, part of the ARPAnet
coterie,clearly stated in a report he authored, “...no attempt is being made to emulate a full-
scale, inter-organizational mail system.”

Given the term email was not used prior to 1978, and there was no intention to emulate “...a
full-scale, inter-organizational mail system,” as late as December 1977, there is no controversy
here, except the one created by industry insiders, who have a vested interest to protect a false
branding that BBN is the “inventor of email”, which the facts obliterate.
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.

Who Invented Email? Just Ask … Noam ChomskWHO INVENTED EMAIL?   That’s a
question sure to spark some debate. And where there’s debate, the appearance
of Noam Chomsky should come as no surprise.
This week, Chomsky — the professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at
MIT who’s known as much for his criticism of US foreign policy and capitalism
as much as his academic work — unexpectedly joined the debate over the origins
of email, putting his weight behind V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, a man who claims he
invented email as in 1978 at the age of 14 while working at a medical and
dentistry university in New Jersey.
Today, Ayyadurai is a lecturer at MIT, and he once studied with Chomsky. But
Chomsky says he backs Ayyadurai’s claims for reasons of, yes, semantics.
“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,” reads a statement from Chomsky that fired across
the internet in a press release from Ayyadurai.

Yes, by 1978, people were already sending electronic messages across

computer networks, but Ayyadurai says he was the first person to build a
software program called “email” — and that he was the first to structure
electronic communications in a way that mirrored methods traditionally used
to move paper mail through an office, setting up electronic “inboxes” and
“outboxes” and “address books.”

In February, after some documentation supporting Ayyadurai’s claims was

accepted by the Smithsonian, The Washington Post ran a long profile of the
MIT lecturer, describing him as the father of email. But after many objected to
his claims, the paper published a mammoth correction, casting considerable
doubt over Ayyadurai’s place in the history of email.
Some trace email all the way back to the mid-’60s and MIT’s Compatible
Time-Sharing System (CTSS). Originally, CTSS let users remotely log into a
single MIT computer and store files to discs where they could be accessed by
others, and then in 1961, Tom Van Vleck developed a “mail” command that let
users send electronic messages to other users of the system.
But some argue that this wasn’t really email because the messages never left a
single machine, that they didn’t really go across a network. They say true email
arrived several years later on the ARPAnet, the research network funded by
the US Department of Defense that would eventually give rise to the internet.
In 1971, a man named Ray Tomlinson built a messaging system atop the
ARPAnet that sent electronic messages between machines.

“There seems to be little disagreement over who wrote what, and

approximately when,” Van Vleck tells Wired. “The argument is over what to
call things.”

Chomsky joined the argument on Tuesday. “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,” his
statement continues.

Chomsky’s argument is that Ayyadurai received a formal copyright

registration on his email program in 1982, and that in 1977, David Crocker —
who worked on the ARPAnet and has criticized Ayyadurai’s claims — wrote
that “no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-organizational
mail system.”

“Given the term email was not used prior to 1978, and there was no intention
to emulate ‘…a full-scale, inter-organizational mail system,” as late as
December 1977, there is no controversy here, except the one created by
industry insiders, who have a vested interest,” Chomsky says.

Reached by, yes, email, Chomsky confirms that he is putting his weight behind
Ayyadurai’s claims. “What I found out seemed to confirm his story,” Chomsky
tells Wired. “I read his documentation, the counterarguments, his responses,
and his position seemed to me plausible.”

Proof, VA Shiva Ayyadurai says, of his

invention of email. Photo: www.inventorofemail.com
But the debate will no doubt continue.

Ayyadurai says that his invention was quite different than anything that came
before — that email is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-
organizational paper-based mail system. He carefully emphasizes that last
word. The predecessors to his creation, he contends, were less organized,
much simpler messaging systems. His system, he says, was the first to use the
concepts that we recognize in modern tools like Outlook and Gmail.
Speaking with Wired, he points out that you could call the telegraph a form of
email as well.

In addition to soliciting the backing of Chomsky, Ayyadurai has enlisted the

help of his old boss the University of Medical and Dentistry of New Jersey,
Leslie Michelson, and he has set up a website to support his
claims:www.inventorofemail.com.
Why is he fighting so hard to stake his claim? “I want to be clear,” Ayyadurai
tells Wired. “The intention of my sharing the facts was not about getting name
and money for the invention of email, but to share what I thought was an
inspiring message that even something as grand as email, could get created
under the right conditions. What was unfortunate was the reaction.”

Additional reporting by Robert McMillan

Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.y

Noam Chomsky weighs in on

Ayyadurai's email invention
claim
34
MIT Linguist and activist author Noam Chomsky is
defending A.V. Shiva Ayyadurai's claim to having
invented email.
by Jeff Blagdon Jun 13, 2012, 6:56a
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 chomsky (flickr - andrew rusk)

Celebrated linguist and radical activist Noam Chomsky is defending his former student V.A.
Shiva Ayyadurai’s claim to the invention of email. A February Washington Post story on
Ayyadurai’s "EMAIL" computer program copyright and his work’s inclusion in the Smithsonian
has sparked intense debate about what constitutes "email" and who should be considered its
inventor — a title often given to Ray Tomlinson.

"EMAIL WAS INVENTED IN 1978 BY A 14-YEAR-OLD WORKING IN NEWARK, NJ.

THE FACTS ARE INDISPUTABLE."

Chomsky contends that "there is no controversy here, except the one created by industry
insiders." In the summer of 1978, the then-14-year-old Ayyadurai first began work on EMAIL, a
program he designed to emulate the interoffice paper mail system used at the University of
Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Reiterating a point in a blog post by Ayyadurai,
Chomsky quotes David Crocker — a member of the ARPANET research community in the
1970s — who in 1977 stated that "…no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale, inter-
organizational mail system," just a year before Ayyadurai began his work on EMAIL.

Ayyadurai’s claim is that while systems for transferring messages between networked computers
had been around for years, the EMAIL application he developed was composed of "interlocked
parts" that enabled ordinary office workers to send and receive messages; something that at the
time had only been accessible to academics and engineers.

Noam Chomsky disputes email history

The linguist argues that a former student of his invented
email in 1978
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8COMMENTS
Disputing a great deal of counter-evidence, famed cognitive
psychologist and linguist Noam Chomsky insists that email was
invented in 1978 by a precocious 14-year-old.
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"The facts are indisputable," Chomsky wrote, in a
statement issued Tuesday. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented e-mail
in 1978 in New Jersey, as a part of a summer project to digitize
an interoffice mail system for a hospital lab, Chomsky asserted.

Chomsky's comments follow a heated debate over the merits of

Ayyadurai's claim, sparked in part by a Washington Post article
that ran in February that also named Ayyadurai as the inventor of
email.

Chomsky's argument is largely linguistic, noting that the term

"email" was not used prior to Ayyadurai use of it. In 1978
Ayyadurai coined the word "email" to name the technology he
created to electronically replicate an interoffice, inter-
organizational mail system. Ayyadurai submitted his code to the
U.S. Copyright Office, which awarded him a copyright on the
term in 1982. Borrowing from inter-organizational mail systems,
Ayyadurai also specified a number of features common to email
systems today, such as inbox, cc:, forward, reply, address book,
groups and return receipt.

However, most histories of the Internet point to electronic-mail

systems being in place well before 1978, according to Internet
historian Ian Peter.

The first electronic-mail systems resided on single multiuser

computers, Peter noted. Then, the processing of electronically
sending someone a message involved using a program that
would place the message somewhere in the recipient's file
directory where it could be read, often in a directory named mail.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Mailbox program
offered this capability in 1965.

As computers were joined together on the Defense Department's

DARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet, users needed a way to
send messages among different computer systems. Bolt Beranek
and Newman (BBN) engineer Ray Tomlinson created an address
format in 1972 that would allow messages to be sent across
DARPAnet to different computer systems. The address format, in
use today, consists of a user name, followed by an at symbol,
followed by the name of the computer or computer network. The
system was in use by hundreds of DARPAnet users by 1974.

That BBN has claimed itself as the inventor of email has enraged
Chomsky, who called the company's assertions "the childish
tantrums of industry insiders. Despite Ayyadurai's coinage of the
term email, few of those working on the DARPAnet had heard of
Ayyadurai or his technologies, according to a recent article in
Boston magazine.

Such controversies about the origins of technology are not new,

and perhaps not surprising given the incremental and
evolutionary steps that seem to be an inherent part of innovation.
Earlier this year, Matthew Inman, who is the creator of the
Oatmeal comic Web site and Forbes columnist Alex Knapp
engaged in a heated Internet debate over whether or not Nikola
Tesla invented alternating current, as well as his role in other
inventions.

Chomsky is an institute professor and professor emeritus in the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of
Linguistics and Philosophy. He served as an adviser to
Ayyadurai, when Ayyadurai was a student at MIT in the early
1980s.

Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology

breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on
Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address
is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
Joab Jackson — U.S. Correspondent