Shiva Ayyadurai, a 14-year old, dark-skinned, lower-caste, Indian immigrant boy, working at the University of Medicine and Dentistry New Jersey in 1978 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.
but it isn't that Simple...!!
Who really invented e-mail? An American ARPANET engineer who created a fundamental transmission protocol? Or an India-born teenager who came up with a relatively novel user interface?
If you search for - Who invented e-mail? you will more likely get the answer for that as Ray Tomlinson and it is somewhat true only.
According to Wikipedia - Raymond Samuel Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) was a pioneering American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on the ARPANET system, the precursor to the Internet, in 1971; It was the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts connected to ARPANET. Previously, mail could be sent only to others who used the same computer. To achieve this, he used the @ sign to separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme that has been used in email addresses ever since. The Internet Hall of Fame in its account of his work commented "Tomlinson's email program brought about a complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate".
Ray Tomlinson (left) and Shiva Ayyadurai
Why does this explanation seem a little complicated? Simply because back in 1970, we could already send electronic messages to users on the same computer or computers on the same server. Once computers were able to talk to other computers, through networking, computer engineers needed to find a way to expand electronic communication. In simple language, we needed a way from leaving ‘electronic post-it notes’ (which could be done with people who shared a computer or server) to sending ‘electronic letters with addresses displayed on the envelope’.
What Tomlinson did was that he tweaked the SNDMSG software program (which was developed and used at the University of California, Berkeley, for its internal messaging system) in order to be able to send messages into the mailbox of a user on a different computer and server. In order to replicate the addresses we use on physical letters, Tomlinson decided that the @ (‘at’) key could be used in order to specify the recipient’s computer as well her account name. The standards that he developed for this allowed messages to be sent from different types of computers to other different computers. This standard of inter-compatibility along with the usage of the @ sign has been widely seen as the birth of e-mail.
The work that Ayyadurai carried out in 1978 had very little to do with the text messaging standards that Tomlinson created in 1971. It was, as he describes in his book The EMAIL Revolution, an “electronic version of an interoffice physical mail system”. According to the Westinghouse talent award entry on Ayyadurai’s work, the system was a ‘simple electronic mail system running on a HP/1000 timesharing minicomputer’.
Inspired by how physical memos would work in offices, his system (created for the University of Medicine and Dentistry, New Jersey) came with a relatively novel user interface that included features such as an ‘inbox’ and ‘outbox’. Users could ‘compose’, ‘forward’, or ‘reply’ to messages through various commands.
The second defining feature of Ayyadurai’s work is that this user interface was decoupled from how the actual message would be sent. The user interface was called the ‘EMAIL’ software program while the transmission methods were carried out by a piece of software called ‘SENDR’ that actually edited, processed, and transmitted the message.
Instead of using a new communication protocol for message transmission – which was essentially what Tomlinson created – Ayyadurai’s system was based on using a shared database so that sending a message consisted of essentially inserting or removing records from database tables. These ‘records’ were replicated across all computers that ran that particular database software.
As he describes it in his book, “if the sender and recipient were in different locations and on different servers … we simply pointed to the email data in the remote database server.” In Ayyadurai’s system, a ‘Postmaster’ was required to ensure that emails were sent and monitor whether a server was down at any point in time.
In 1982, Ayyadurai later applied for and received a copyright for the term ‘EMAIL’ after his user interface program.
Deciding who gets credit for an invention is often a function of what environment the invention occurs within. If a technology-related invention takes place in Silicon Valley, it is more likely that it will get noticed and be placed within a proper historical context when compared to a similar, concurrent invention in a country like India.
Tomlinson’s creation of the standards behind transmitting electronic messages, and his usage of the @ sign, took place in the cradle of software and hardware development – in a company that essentially created the predecessor to the Internet.
Tomlinson’s work, therefore, has been carefully cataloged in and referenced by extremely influential sources, such as the Internet Hall of Fame. He has been awarded by the American Computer Museum and the International Academy of Digital Arts and Science. In short, Tomlinson’s work took place within a context that allowed it to be properly recognised.
In contrast, Ayyadurai’s work took place when he was 14 years old and was carried out at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in New Jersey, a place not exactly known for cutting-edge software and hardware development. His creation has not been assembled as a body of work properly; The Westinghouse Science Talent Search competition has some of his work-up, but the actual process of putting it all together happened in an institutional context only in 2012, when the Smithsonian and American History Museum accepted some of Ayyadurai’s donations to preserve his ‘place in history'.
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