THE INVENTOR OF EMAIL Innovation Anytime, Anyplace, by Anybody®

interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system: inbox, outbox, folders, address book, attachments, etc. But, it was all done using paper. Experts thought it impossible to create a computer-based version of that system and did not attempt to take on this challenge. But, perhaps because of my ignorance, as a 14-year old kid, I never thought it impossible when my supervisor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson at a small medical college in Newark, NJ challenged me to do so. I wrote 50,000 lines of FORTRAN code across a system of about 35 software programs to create the first such electronic system. It was a success. I called it email, a term never used before in the English language. I received the first U.S. Copyright for that invention, at a time when copyright was the only way to protect software inventions. The struggle and victory ( Before email, there was the. But, it was all done using paper. Experts thought it impossible to create a computer-based version of that system and did not attempt to take on this challenge. But, perhaps because of my ignorance, as a 14-year old kid, I never thought it impossible when my supervisor Dr. Leslie P. Michelson at a small medical college in Newark, NJ challenged me to do so. I wrote 50,000 lines of FORTRAN code across a system of about 35 software programs to create the first such electronic system. It was a success. I called it email, a term never used before in the English language. I received the first U.S. Copyright for that invention, at a time when copyright was the only way to protect software inventions. The struggle and victory ( $750,000 payment from Gawker Media ) to share these facts, celebrate that boy, his hard work and the infinite possibilities of that America, which provided me an ecosystem to create and innovate. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, Ph.D. | Inventor & Scientist | email: vashiva@vashiva.com

Six Facts About Email and Its Invention

Directory of Those Who Have Shared Their Views, Testimonials &

Expert Perspectives on Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and the Invention of Email

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Research Papers On the Facts of Emails Origin, False Claims and

the Motivation to Perpetuate the False Claims and Revisionist History

Title: Origin of Email & Misuses of the Term Email

Authors: D. Nightingale, S. Song, L.P. Michelson, R. Field



Summary:

This research paper provides the facts about emails origin from Newark, New Jersey in 1978 and exposes, point by point, with detailed primary references, the fake news and lies spread by the so-called internet pioneers and historians who have a vested interest in perpetuating the following myths about emails origin. Twelve of those and myths are exposed:



#1: Email was created on the ARPANET

#2: Ray Tomlinson Invented Email and Sent the First Email

#3: 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 Title: Invention of Email in Newark, NJ (1978): The First Email System

Authors: L.P. Michelson, R. Field, D. J. Nightingale, S. Song, M. Feuerman, R.L. Corson



Summary:

This research paper provides the detailed history of emails invention in Newark, New Jersey and exposes the motivation of a cabal dedicated to perpetuating the propaganda of the golden triangle of the military-industrial-academic complex as the source of all revolutionary innovations. Email was invented to digitize this entire system of civilian office communications and not just to exchange text messages reliably for military battlefield communications. Email, as the paper shows, did emerge from collaboration, but not from the triangle, but organically in a local, and indigenous ecosystem of a small medical college, where a brilliant young boy, committed teachers, a loving family, and a dedicated mentor, solved a civilian problem, exemplifying countless other innovations across millennia, inspired to advance life not retrofitted from technologies intended to maim and kill. Title: What is Email? And, Who Invented It?

Authors: L.P. Michelson



Summary:

This research paper written by Dr. Leslie P. Michelson defines what is email and provides the historical, social and technological background of its invention in Newark, New Jersey ###

Views, Testimonials & Expert Perspectives on Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai and His Invention of Email

ARVIND GUPTA Technology Innovator

Co-Founder, Digital India Foundation Shiva Ayyadurai is the father of email. For far too long we have all been led to be believe that communications greatest innovations came out of defense research, inspired by the needs of war. Email was created in a place of light and cooperation and it is important for people across the world to understand and appreciate this. Why does academic credit matter? Because the journey matters, the motivation matters and history matters to generations of inventors, dreamers and entrepreneurs deserve to know the truth. Big change happens in small places when opportunity meets people who are driven to find answers. Thats how email, as we know it, came to be.

DEBORAH J. NIGHTINGALE, PHD Ret. Professor of Eng. Systems Division & Aeronautics & Astronautics

Fmr. Director of MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Member - National Academy of Engineering (NAE)

Co-Author of Architecting the Future Enterprise (MIT Press) Email is a system, not the mere exchange of text messages. It is the electronic emulation of a complex systems process that already existed in the interoffice mail processing environment, where collaboration was front and center. An email message, unlike a simple text message, touched multiple sets of people in the intra- and inter-organizational enterprise, to get major tasks done: making decisions, hiring new employees, formalizing contracts, closing business and much more --- in short an integral system for running an organization --- small or large. This is what email was designed for, and it makes absolute sense why it came out of a health sciences institution, where collaboration was critical to day-to-day operations.



Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is the inventor of email --- that enterprise system, which is the mainstay of every organization. He never claimed to be the inventor of 'electronic messaging' as the Smithsonian and Washington Post stated in error, and got completely wrong. There is no controversy here except the one fabricated by these 'internet pioneers' to confuse and mislead journalists. Real journalists and scholars, without vested interests and prejudices, now need to set the record straight.

ROBERT CONDON Fmr. Senior Analyst - Booz, Allen and Hamilton, Inc.

Ret. Captain & Staff of Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet

United States Navy As early as 1972, I used naval messaging between ships and shore stations to transmit and receive electronic text messages using HF/UHF. This was how electronic communications took place in the Navy at the time, and this was via an electronic teletype. Later as a post-graduate officer in the United States Navy during 1978-1979, I sent text messages between computers on an intranet.



Regardless, these rudimentary text messaging systems required complex commands to construct, send and receive a message. None of these systems were email --- the system, we all know today, or what Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai created in 1978.



For example, every message had to be printed out, then was archived in physical file box folders. Sorting was physical, the distribution of the message was manual as it had to be printed and copied on mimeograph machines, at times. There was no electronic Inbox, Outbox, Folders for archiving, Attachments, Address Book, tracking of Deleted Mail, etc. None of these features existed. These early methods for exchanging simple text messages were sufficient for the military's requirement for sending messages from point to point, and were not designed for collaboration as was in the interoffice mail system. The military's particular needs for communications were dictated by an inherent hierarchy that issued orders and directions that needed to be secure with a focus on the direct transfer of messages.



Any attempt at collaborating was time-consuming and manpower intensive. And, those early systems required us to write code and use commands that untrained personnel could not do. It wasn't email.

RUDOLPH TANZI, PHD TIME 100 Most Influential People in the World

2015 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award Recipient

Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy Professor of Neurology,

Vice-Chair, MGH Neurology (Research)

Director, Genetics and Aging Research Unit

MassGeneral Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease

Harvard Medical School As a scientist who discovered and characterized many of the known Alzheimer's disease genes including the first one, I am honored to partner with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai towards finding a cure for Alzheimer's using his latest invention CytoSolve. CytoSolve, like his invention of email, is a powerful systems platform for cooperation. Dr. Ayyadurai deserves the utmost honor and respect, as we would give any of the world's great innovators. He invented email as a kid, was recognized by MIT for that and other innovations, received many accolades, and created jobs for thousands of Americans, and more. He didn't make a penny for inventing email. Those who are now defaming him, thinking by screaming louder they can erase the historical facts of his inventing email, should be ashamed. These individuals have little to no history of innovation, discovery or really creating anything, themselves. This victory provides us an opportunity to see through their irrational behavior, wherever they originate from, and recognize that Dr. Ayyadurai is a modern day Da Vinci. His life's work speaks for itself.

MO ROCCA Journalist

Episode 19  Inventor of Email

Aired on CBS Henry Fords Innovation Nation How many times have you checked your email today? Well, there is one man who is hugely responsible for that. Next time your fingers hit the keyboard to write a quick email. You might want to say, thank you to Shiva Ayyadurai. Specifically, thank the 14-year-old version of him who invented email.

LESLIE P. MICHELSON, PHD Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's Mentor During 1978-1981 at UMDNJ

Director, Office of Advanced Research Computing

Rutgers University The facts are black and white on this. There is no gray area. The ARPANET didn't invent email. Ray Tomlinson didn't invent email. And, neither did the so-called 'internet pioneers' of the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email. What the 'internet pioneers' did invent was a revisionist history of email's birth, which this victory exposes.



Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's work reveals a larger truth that should be evident by now: innovation can happen anywhere, anytime, by anyone. This victory provides an opportunity to embrace that truth. The sooner we do, 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 the drive to make big contributions.

DESH DESHPANDE, PHD Founder & Fmr. Chairman, Sycamore Networks

Founder, Deshpande Foundation for Innovation

Co-Chairman of U.S. President Barack Obamas National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Life Member, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation As someone who completed a Ph.D. in data communications in the 1970s and built various communication technology companies, the methods at the time for communication between computers were limited to basic exchange of text messages. We at the Deshpande Foundation find Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's invention of email, as a 14-year-old in 1978, an inspiration to all young innovators. His invention symbolizes and expresses what parents around the world want their children to embrace -- that innovation has no boundaries and human potential has no limits.

DOUG AAMOTH Technology Editor

The Man Who Invented Email

November 11, 2011

Time Magazine I had the opportunity to sit down with V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds the first copyright for EMAILa system he began building in 1978 at just 14 years of age. It was modeled after the communication system being used at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. His task: replicate the Universitys traditional mail system electronically. And with that, emailas we currently know itwas born. article link

SANJAY SARMA, PHD Professor of Mechanical Engineering &

Vice-President of Open Learning

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai was one of my finest teaching assistants while he was completing his Ph.D. at MIT in the Department of Biological Engineering. I am happy to hear of the Court's ruling in his favor against the libel and defamation he endured. This win demonstrates the fairness of the American judicial system.

LAWRENCE E. WEBER Chairman & CEO, Racepoint Global

Founder, Weber Shandwick

Co-Founder, Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX)

Executive Committee, The U.S. Council on Competitiveness Email is a business application. You don't need the Internet for email. For nearly fifteen years before the Web took off in 1993, people were using email on local area networks and wide area networks, independent of the Internet. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email in that business office environment to address a business need among ordinary people. But, not only did he invent email in the 1970s, he later went on in the 1990s to create EchoMail, which solved the problems of handling large volumes of inbound email and to take advantage of the incredible marketing opportunities that email afforded. I've known Dr. Ayyadurai since 1996 when he first won the Massachussets Interactive Media Council's Award for EchoMail. He has gone on continually to make monumental contributions to email. He is the world's leading expert on email, from its birth to today.

JIM SANGER Tech Investor

Software Executive and Author The authoritative history of email has not yet been written. When that volume is eventually produced, I have no doubt that it will include the names of numerous individuals who will be justly identified as having invented specific technologies and protocols relevant to email's development. Indeed, many of these contributors created their various electronic messaging innovations in response to the specialized needs and desires of small numbers of technical staffers and research personnel during the heady early days of modern computing.



But I also believe that it is likely that one figure will stand out for conceptualizing and innovating - at the precocious age of 14 - the kind of overarching system of email that so broadly intersects and impacts our business and personal lives today. Shiva Ayyadurai's development of email as a real-world system focused explicitly on the broader types of inter-office, inter-organizational and interpersonal social communications essential in business and private affairs set different stakes and aspirations for what electronic messaging could be.



The preeminent historian of science Thomas Parke Hughes has described some innovators like Edison and Sperry as 'holistic conceptualizers,' 'solvers of the problems associated with systems,' and 'inventor-entrepreneurs.' While perhaps not directly comparable in scale or particulars, Ayyadurai's approach to email's innovation can be seen, I believe, in similar terms: as an accomplishment in system-vision and system-execution that in many prescient ways accurately foresaw email as the kind of pervasive, practical communication system now used by billions of people for both commercial and personal social interactions.

GERALD E. WALKER Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's Honors & Advanced Placement High School Chemistry Teacher

New Jersey State Teacher of the Year

Ret. Principal, Livingston High School I remember vividly my conversations with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai in the early stages of his initiative in 1978 when he was working hard on the creation and development of email. Knowing the basic concept of what he was creating and the fact that it was so innovative, I and another teacher in our science department recommended that he apply for the Westinghouse Talent Search Award for high school students. Email was to be the electronic version of interoffice mail systems. I specifically remember us looking at our school district's Interoffice Mail Envelope and thinking about Dr. Ayyadurai having told me that all the intricacies of this labor intensive system with its creation, delivery, receipt and distribution aspects would one day not be necessary. He had an objective/goal to replace it and other things with his invention. He worked diligently at both his school work and the creation of what we now know as email. Shiva was obviously very successful at both.

ROBERT FIELD Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's Colleague During 1978-1981 at UMDNJ

Senior Information Systems & Technology Programmer

Rutgers University It was remarkable that Shiva built such a large system with the limited resources that he had available. Forgetting even the idea --- just the perseverance of the implementation. Nowadays computer programmers have access to gigabytes worth of memory. We were running systems where Shiva had to write 65,000 lines of code that ran anywhere in 7 to 11 kilobytes, that's thousands, not mega --- millions, not giga --- billions, of memory. Manually segmenting the code, overlays, etc. Just from the sheer point of view of being able to do that with ANY program was a monumental achievement, forgetting aside the innovativeness of what he was actually creating. That was an act of real perseverance. PLUS, he was did it in FORTRAN IV, a language that is dedicated to numbers, and he's doing a text-oriented program. video link

RICHARD CORSON, MD Medical Student in Dr. Michelson's Lab in the Late 1970s.

Family Practitioner

Computer Programmer In the late 1970s, while I was in the midst of completing my medical school degree, I also worked in Dr. Leslie P. Michelson's laboratory to create a technology called CHRGR that allowed us to bill (charge) for applications that ran on the Hewlett Packard (HP) RTE-IVB operating system. At the time, I remember Shiva's invention, EMAIL, which was the first email system. With CHRGR, we were able to bill for those who used applications (such as EMAIL) on the HP operating system.

STEPHEN Y. CHOW, JD Partner, Burns and Levinson, LLP

Elected Member, American Law Institute

Commissioner, Massachusetts Uniform Law Commission

Adjunct Professor, Suffolk University Law School In August 1982, the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress registered Shiva Ayyadurais email code and users manual. According to its records, these were the first works registered under the title, ‘Email,’ preceding the next such registration by two years. Dr. Ayyadurais registrations and deposits showed to the world his reduction to practice of his email system.



These registrations were remarkable for a eighteen-year old student, involving non-trivial procedures under a Copyright Act only recently open to protecting software. Protecting software creations by copyright was the common wisdom of the day. Not only were patents largely disfavored during decades preceding the creation in 1982 of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court had held software unpatentable unless it was adjunct to a physical process. Only in 1994 did the Federal Circuit recognize software as patentable for creating new physical machines in conjunction with the computers the software programmed (recently the Supreme Court limited this principle).



Had the patenting path for software been considered possible in 1982 generally and particularly by the MIT community, I have little doubt that Dr. Ayyadurai would have pursued it. In fact, unlike later software copyright owners who kept their code secret and deposited only identifying portions, Dr. Ayyadurai kept with the original reading of the United States Constitution provision for patents and copyrights to promote disclosure in return for limited exclusivity. Unlike many, in return for protection of his code, Dr. Ayyadurai contributed to the public the ideas shown and searchable in his ‘Email’ deposits in the Library of Congress.

ARTURO OSARIO FERNANDEZ, PHD Assistant Professor of Professional Practice

Fellow, Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development

Rutgers University The birth of email can be best described as the natural progression of interoffice communications systems taking advantage of emerging electronic technology to achieve more efficient ways to enact internal document sharing and commenting protocols. This original collaborative model was first introduced at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (CMDNJ) in Newark, NJ as an electronic version of their ongoing internal document sharing protocol used to facilitate the distribution of information and channel collaborations. Helping the emergence of this innovation within CMDNJ was the internal diversity of the institution reflecting the urban environment where they were nested.



This innovative process relied on two key elements to emerged; a deep understanding of the collaborative purpose of the original institutional interoffice communication system and a collective willingness to explore non-conventional solutions that could challenge the status quo of an institutional system that was deemed already adequate at the time. This last point, the willingness to explore new solutions that could challenge the local status quo is a trademark of creative urban spaces that had, in recent years, been label as the home for the new creative class.

SEN SONG, PHD Professor of Computational Neuroscience

Dept. of Biomedical Eng. & Center for Brain-like Computation Research

Tsinghua University I've known Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai since his Ph.D. research at MIT. He is one of the brightest scientists I've ever met. As someone who has been a software programmer since the age of 10, I know intimately what it takes to program complex software that actually works for end users. What he accomplished as a 14-year-old in 1978, with all the technological constraints, is simply amazing and sheer genius. It also shows that a creative idea can go a long way without requiring a massive budget. It's time that the entire world recognizes the real origin of email.

ALI GALLAGHER, PHD, JD Nurse Who Used Email in Late 1970s at UMDNJ

Technologist & Innovator EMAIL was the first email system. How do I know? Because when I was a nurse working at Martland Hospital, in Newark, New Jersey in the late 1970s, I used it. I was among the hundreds of ordinary office and health care workers who were the first users of email in the world. It revolutionized communications, and had every feature we utilized in our interoffice mail system. I remember many years later, in 1987s, when I was doing a postdoctoral fellowship in the Office of Honorable Richard A. Gephardts and witnessed their communication system, I shared with them what I experienced at UMDNJ in the 1970s, which was light years ahead of what they were using then. Today, as an inventor and entrepreneur, I am elated to hear of Shivas victory against those who tried to erase his inventing email from innovation history.

SHEKHAR SHASTRI Head of Innovation Lab, Sun Life Financial

East Coast Co-Chair, TiECON

Innovation Expert This victory is a victory for all innovators. Anyone can come up with 'ideas.' At our innovation lab, we don't even like that word 'idea.' What's wonderful about the facts of the invention of email at a small medical college in Newark, NJ in 1978 is that this was not JUST an idea --- but represented the end-to-end process of innovation from original conception, understanding the customer, building a solution that was customer-focused, that others of the time thought impossible, and the actual delivery, servicing, and ongoing maintenance to meet customer needs. This is innovation. This is what is remarkable about the invention of email by a 14-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai. That experience clearly influenced and inspired his other innovations: EchoMail, Systems Health and CytoSolve, which are equally revolutionary, and, like email, are changing the world.

ROGER MARK, MD, PHD Distinguished Professor of Health Sciences and Technology &

of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Assistant Professor of Medicine

Harvard Medical School I was Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's undergraduate advisor. He was a brilliant student. I am pleased to hear of his victory.

MICHAEL HANSEN, PHD Senior Scientist

Consumer Union Having worked with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, I am incredibly impressed by CytoSolve, which has been published and cited in eminent journals such as Nature Biotechnology, IEEE and others. His efforts in employing a systems approach using CytoSolve to expose the lack of safety standards in genetically engineered foods (GMOs) is a significant scientific contribution to public health and science.

SR. EXPERIENCED WIKIPEDIA EDITOR In Email Communication with Dr. Ayyadurais Chief of Staff I seem to have stepped into a mess by accident. [A]s 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.

MICHAEL A. PADLIPSKY 1970s ARPANET Researcher

Author of 20 RFCs

Essay And They Argued All Night , 2000  the [Raytheon]BBN guys  who always seemed to get to write the histories and hence always seemed to have claimed to have invented everything.



 enormous bias can be introduced into all history books, much less technohistory ones, based on whom the authors talk, or refer, to first ... and whom they find agreeable, of course.

NOAM CHOMSKY, PHD Institute Professor

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 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.



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.

FRANK SERPICO Ret. Police Officer, New York City Police Dept. (NYPD)

Medal of Honor, NYPD

Author & Lecturer

Anti-Corruption Crusader I know a bit about fighting corruption. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's struggle and victory against corrupt academics and 'journalists' is a noble one. This priesthood has lived off a 'get out of jail free card' for perpetuating false histories about nearly everything. His victory inspires us to continue the fight for truth and justice against formidable and reactionary forces.

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Six Facts About Email and Its Invention

FACT #1

Email is a System.

An Electronic Replica of the Interoffice Mail System &

NOT the Simple Exchange of Text Messages Email is a system designed to be the electronic replica of the many features and functions of the interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system that used paper documents to enable collaboration, cooperation and communication among users of differing expertise within the business office environment. The interoffice mail system consisted of multiple, linked and cooperating systems and processes including: 1) the secretarys desktop: the Typewriter, INBOX, OUTBOX, FOLDERS, ADDRESS BOOK, Paper Clips for ATTACHMENTS, TRASH CAN, and other components; 2) the interoffice memo and interoffice envelope: TO:, FROM:, SUBJECT:, DATE:, BODY:, CC:, BCC:; 3) multiple methods for processing: FORWARDING, SCANNING, SORTING, DELETING, COMPOSING, ARCHIVING, EDITING, RETURN RECEIPT PROCESSING, and more; and, 4) transportation systems consisting of personnel, pneumatic tubes, mailroom clerks, trucks and vans for the receipt and delivery of the paper documents at different locations. Email is not the simple exchange of text messages. The simple transfer of text messages, using electronic or electrical devices, beginning with the invention of the Morse code telegraph of the mid 1800s, were referred to by various names including electric mail, electronic mail, and electronic messaging to broadly refer to the electronification of text messages. Other such examples included exchange of text messages using the 1939 IBM radio-type; or ARPANET messaging, using the familiar @ sign, for primitive electronic communications between computers. But, this is not email --- the electronic system for emulating the entire interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system --- the system we all know and use today.

FACT #2

Internet Pioneers Had Thought It Impossible to Create Email Electronic messaging researchers had thought it impossible to create email. For example, in December of 1977, a few months before Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email, David Crocker, an "internet pioneer" in electronic messaging, stated in the detailed Introduction of a seminal RAND Corporation Report that summarized the state-of-the-art research in electronic messaging at the time: At this time [December, 1977], no attempt is being made to emulate the full-scale, inter-organizational mail system.[p.4, Introduction: Framework for Using Message Systems]



To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible . 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. Consequently, important segments of a full message environment have received little or no attention.[pp. 7-10, Introduction: Scope of Specification and Implementation] These statements reflect the limited scope of the efforts of these "internet pioneers," who were narrowly focused on rudimentary text messaging systems and were proposing minor modifications to expand that rudimentary functionality. The Background section of the Introduction begins by providing the historical context of such rudimentary text messaging systems: Time-shared computers typically have a systems which allows their users to pass informal messages among themselves. [The] message system tends to remain relatively simple and used only for terse, infrequent communications. The Background expands by providing a summary of those rudimentary text-messaging systems and proposes some ideas on expanding the feature set. In the Operational Model section of the Introduction, basic observations of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system are provided, demonstrating knowledge of its existence. However, and most importantly, the notion of creating an electronic version of this interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, within the critical "Scope of Specification and Implementation," section of the Introduction (pp. 7-10), unequivocally states, that such a development is not within the scope of their efforts. In February 2012 when Dr. Ayyadurai was honored by the Smithsonian, ironically, it was Crocker who was a leader in the defamation campaign to attack Dr. Ayyadurai's work and reputation. When the above Report was discovered and exposed, clearly showing that neither Crocker nor his ARPANET colleagues had any intention to create email, the electronic replica of the interoffice mail system, Crocker contacted Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, likely believing he could soften the expose' of Crocker's historical revisionism. However, Dr. Michelson elected not to speak with him given the damage that Crocker had already done to Dr. Ayyadurai's reputation. The factual record also shows that the ARPANET information brochure of 1978, and even the one of 1986 (eight years later), makes no reference to the word "email," "e-mail" or "Electronic Mail," neither in the body of the brochure nor in the index of their brochure. What is absolutely false is to claim that the ARPANET invented email and the "@" is equivalent to email.

FACT #3

In 1978, 14-Year-Old Shiva Ayyadurai Invents Email In 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai did not think it "impossible" to create a full-scale electronic replica of the inter-organizational paper-based mail system. With a singular intention to create such a system, he succeeded in doing what "internet pioneers" had not only thought impossible but also had no interest in pursuing. He wrote nearly 50,000 lines of code, across an interconnected system of nearly 35 software programs to create the first full-scale electronic replica of the interoffice paper-based mail system that ran across a multi-campus network. The system was technologically decades ahead of its time in using distributed databases, full administrative and management capabilities, with fault detection and resolution --- features necessary for real world use. It was a full-scale production implementation, used by hundreds, and was commercialized --- people were charged and paid to use the system. In summary, it was a success.



He named this system, "EMAIL," a term never used before in the English language. At the time of email's invention, neither copyright law nor patent law existed for protecting software inventions. In 1980, the United States government passed the Computer Software Act of 1980, which amended the Copyright Act of 1976, to protect software inventions through Copyright. In 1981, Dr. Ayyadurai won a prestigious Westinghouse Science Honors Award for his invention of email. In the same year, he applied for a Copyright to protect the invention.



On August 30, 1982, the United States government issued the first U.S. Copyright for "Email," to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, legally recognizing him as the inventor of email. Three important and indisputable facts, therefore, stand without question: (1) He was the first to create a full-scale electronic replica of the interoffice mail system; (2) He was the first to name this system "email;" and, (3) He received the first U.S. Copyright for "Email," officially recognizing him as the inventor of email.



It was not until 1994 that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that computer programs were patentable as the equivalent of a "digital machine." Therefore, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai being issued the first Copyright for email in 1982 is of immense historical and legal significance, that cannot be trivialized. Stephen Y. Chow, one of the world's leading legal experts on intellectual property law, has stated with clarity the importance and historical relevance of the issuance of the Copyright to the teenage inventor: In August 1982, the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress registered Shiva Ayyadurai's email code and user's manual. According to its records, these were the first works registered under the title, 'Email,' preceding the next such registration by two years. Dr. Ayyadurai's registrations and deposits showed to the world his reduction to practice of his email system.



These registrations were remarkable for a eighteen-year old student, involving non-trivial procedures under a Copyright Act only recently open to protecting software. Protecting software creations by copyright was the common wisdom of the day. Not only were patents largely disfavored during decades preceding the creation in 1982 of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court had held software unpatentable unless it was adjunct to a physical process. Only in 1994 did the Federal Circuit recognize software as patentable for creating new physical machines in conjunction with the computers the software programmed (recently the Supreme Court limited this principle).



Had the patenting path for software been considered possible in 1982 generally and particularly by the MIT community, I have little doubt that Dr. Ayyadurai would have pursued it. In fact, unlike later software copyright owners who kept their code secret and deposited only identifying portions, Dr. Ayyadurai kept with the original reading of the United States Constitution provision for patents and copyrights to promote disclosure in return for limited exclusivity. Unlike many, in return for protection of his code, Dr. Ayyadurai contributed to the public the ideas shown and searchable in his 'Email' deposits in the Library of Congress.

FACT #4

Ray Tomlinson Didn't Invent Email.

What Did He Actually and Factually Do? Ray Tomlinson modified a pre-existing program called SNDMSG. SNDMSG was not created by Tomlinson. Even before Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG, SNDMSG allowed a user connected to a local computer to append text to an electronic file located on that same local computer. Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG involved copying code from another pre-existing program called CPYNET into the SNDMSG program. CPYNET was a file transfer protocol, which Tomlinson also did not create. Tomlinson's modification allowed a user connected on a local computer to append text to an electronic file located on a remote computer.



This modified version of SNDMSG, like the original SNDMSG, still required the user to have knowledge of cryptic commands, mainly accessible to highly trained technical people, to achieve even this modest result. John Vittal, one of Tomlinson's contemporaries and another "internet pioneer," unequivocally described these early simple systems as rudimentary and incomplete: The very simple systems [including] SNDMSG... did not integrate the reading and creation functions, had different user interfaces, and did not provide sufficient functionality for simple message processing . [John Vittal, 1981] At best, what Tomlinson "invented," was a "caveman Reddit." Tomlinson, by his own admission, said his modification was a "no brainer." Fourteen-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai, in contrast, wrote 50,000 lines of original software code that implemented numerous features and functions to replicate the entire interoffice mail system, with a very easy-to-use-interface enabling anyone to use the system. This is email --- the email we all know and experience today.



This is not to say that someone else would not have created email, given the march of technology history to integrate computing with office automation. However, the fact remains, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai was the first to do it. The conflation of Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG as "email," is a deliberate marketing campaign to enhance the brand value and reputation of Tomlinson's employer, Raytheon/BBN, in the lucrative cybersecurity market (see below).

FACT #5

Beyond his Invention of Email, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai Has

Contributed to the Advancement of Email for Over 35 Years After inventing email in 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai sought neither recognition nor financial gain for his invention of email. He went on to receive four degrees at MIT in engineering, design and biology. In the midst of his PhD at MIT in 1993, he created EchoMail, a revolutionary artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology that automatically reads, classifies, routes and responds to incoming email --- an innovation that became commercialized after winning an industry-wide competition to classify President Clinton's email messages for the U.S. White House. EchoMail grew to $250 million in value and served the largest Fortune 1000 companies such as Nike, American Express, Unilever and major institutions such as the U.S. Senate



EchoMail won nearly every major industry award for email management including the Best Messaging Solution Award from IBM in 1997. In 2000, the front-page article of the eminent MIT Technology Review featured Shiva Ayyadurai as "Dr. Email" and shared the many commercial successes of EchoMail. In 2001, The Wall Street Journal highlighted the power of how "EchoMail Can Sort, Answer Deluge of Emails." In 2002, EchoMail received the highest industry rating from Forrester Research for email marketing technology. Today, EchoMail focuses on small businesses to enable them to use the same powerful A.I. technology for intelligent email management in customer service, sales and marketing.



In 2011, Doug Aamoth, the Technology Editor of Time Magazine, after reviewing the artifacts of Dr. Ayyadurai's 1978 invention, wrote a feature story, "The Man Who Invented Email," sharing the facts of email's invention. In 2012, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) commissioned Dr. Ayyadurai and awarded "The Email Lab," his research group at the International Center for Integrative Systems, two grants totaling nearly $100,000 to develop innovative solutions for saving the ailing USPS using email technology. The two reports were delivered to the USPS leadership's Office of the Inspector General.



That same year, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) honored Dr. Ayyadurai by receiving his artifacts documenting his 1978 invention of email. In 2013, Norton and Penguin published his book The Email Revolution. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal commissioned and published Dr. Ayyadurai's essay on "The Future of Email" for their 125th Anniversary issue. More recently, during the 2016 Presidential elections, The New York Times, referring to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai as the "email pioneer," sought and published his expert commentary on Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. In 2017, his new book The Future of Email will be hitting the bookstands globally.



He continues to innovate across the fields of medicine and health. His latest invention CytoSolve, a technology platform for eliminating animal testing and accelerating drug development, has been used to discover a new combination therapeutic for pancreatic cancer, gaining FDA allowance to proceed to clinical trials in a record 11 months. CytoSolve has also demonstrated the lack of safety standards of genetically engineered foods (GMOs). He is regularly called upon nationally and internationally to share his experience and expertise in email, innovation, medicine and health. (See Below)

FACT #6

Someone Did Benefit from the Vicious Attacks on Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai Only when Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's papers were received by the Smithsonian on February 16, 2012, and after a Washington Post reporter wrote an article entitled, "V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: Inventor of Email Honored by the Smithsonian," did a cabal of "internet pioneers and historians" loyal to the false narrative that the ARPANET and Ray Tomlinson invented email surface to attack Dr. Ayyadurai's lifelong contributions to email. As one MIT professor said,



When [Shivas] material went into the Smithsonian, he threw a wrench into the self-styled and false history of historians who had already written the history of email. This was like a new fossil being found in Africa which completely changed the origin of humans, and it had to be destroyed.



The Washington Post article and the facts it shared disrupted Raytheon's multibillion dollar marketing myth contending, among other things, that inserting the "@" sign between the username and the host server is equivalent to inventing email. The first email system, created by Dr. Ayyadurai in 1978 used the "." as the symbol. The "@" symbol is not email, and has been purposefully conflated through a multi-million dollar marketing campaign to be equated to the invention of email.



Raytheon is a major American defense contractor that competes in a robust and expanding $70 billion cybersecurity market. In 2014, Raytheon won $240 million in cybersecurity business and cites reputation among principal competitive factors considered by customers. They proudly showcase their employee, the late Ray Tomlinson, as the inventor of email, to establish this reputation, to acquire new clients who need to protect their email. They are now caught between the factual record and their marketing campaigns.



Raytheon and Tomlinson's supporters -- the ARPANET cabal -- used the occasion of Dr. Ayyadurai gaining global recognition in 2012 for the invention of email to discredit him. They unleashed vitriol on the Washington Post reporter and forced the editors to print a completely nebulous correction that Shiva Ayyadurai was " not the inventor of electronic messaging." However, Dr. Ayyadurai never claimed to be the inventor of "electronic messaging," whose history goes back to the Morse Code telegraph of the 1800s.



Part of this cabal is a group called Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS). Under the aegis of its "scholarly" blog, its chief spokesperson attacked Dr. Ayyadurai as well as any other experts and journalists who dared to share the historical facts about email's origin from Newark, New Jersey. At the same time, this "scholar" thanked "special interests" from Raytheon/BBN and the ARPANET community for supporting and contributing to his verbal lynching of Dr. Ayyadurai. The blog continued to write defamatory comments calling Dr. Ayyadurai a self-promoter and even attacking Dr. Ayyadurai's seminal research in the systems biology of genetically engineered foods (GMOs) - a topic that this group has absolutely no expertise. All of this took place, while these "scholars" and "historians" deliberately ignored the plagiaristic and truly self-promotional history of Raytheon, and praised the "aw shucks" humility of Ray Tomlinson, the non-inventor of email.



Other unethical individuals and internet rags colluded to simply erase the facts and ridiculed journalists such as Mo Rocca of CBS' Henry Ford's Innovation Nation Show and Doug Aamoth of Time Magazine, who shared the truth about email's origin. These individuals included trolls at TechDirt, who parroted false histories of email history to create bogus citations for the heavily censored and manipulated Wikipedia, with its constant revisionism and purges.



Typical revisionism included vengeful and retaliatory Wikipedia edits. For example, following the initial announcement, on November 3, 2016 of Dr. Ayyadurai's victory over Gawker Media, this cabal enforced a "consensus," in Wikipedia parlance, so as to denigrate Dr. Ayyadurai, in the first sentence of his Wikipedia article, as someone merely "notable for his controversial claim to be the 'inventor of email'."



Other surrogates in this attack included none other than David Crocker, and the online "Museum of Email & Digital Communications," where Crocker is listed as an "Analyst" along with Richi Jennings, another "Analyst" at this "museum," who is an active Wikipedia editor removing and manipulating facts on Dr. Ayyadurai's Wikipedia page. Along the same lines, Raytheon's Chief Scientist, who has collegial relations with Crocker, is on the Editorial Board of the journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, which publishes false histories of email, while ignoring the 1978 invention of email in Newark, NJ.



The nexus of collusion among the "internet pioneers and historians," and their surrogates is deliberate, as evident in their efforts to create fake news on their blogs, and "scholarly journals" for documenting a false and revisionist history, which trolls on Wikipedia then reference as "fact." This insidious system of generating fake news provides an incredibly tight-knit engine for falsifying the history of email.



This collusion on Wikipedia is best reflected in this email communication received by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's assistant Manjula Balaji in 2015 from an experienced Wikipedia editor:



I seem to have stepped into a mess by accident. [A]s 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.

CONCLUSION

The Need for Investigative Journalism In the winter of 2015, Dr. David Skorton, the new Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, met with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and, after hearing the facts, urged him to find an investigative reporter to communicate his experiences. This document and the supplemental materials herein are a start towards supporting such an investigation.



As Dr. Leslie P. Michelson stated, “There is a big motivation to perpetuate the lie that Raytheon/BBN and the so-called 'internet pioneers' invented email.”



Regarding this, one simply needs to consider the core values of Raytheon/BBN and their surrogates when it comes to taking unearned credit. Several years ago, for example, the New York Times Managing Editor David Leonhardt began a scathing expose of William H. Swanson, the CEO of Raytheon, who had published a plagiarized book on integrity, by asking: What should be the punishment for stealing someone else's work and passing it off as your own? Michael A. Padlipsky, one of the leading researchers of the ARPANET community, and the author of nearly 20 RFCs, recollecting his experiences from the ARPANET years of the 1960s and 1970s, wrote in a famous essay, And They Argued All Night...:  the [Raytheon] BBN guys always seemed to get to write the histories and hence always seemed to have claimed to have invented everything . And in 2012, following the attacks on Dr. Ayyadurai, Prof. Noam Chomsky of MIT commented: 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.



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.

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