History is not fixed; like memory itself, it is an act of reconstruction.

Shiva Ayyadurai understands this. Ayyadurai has spent nearly six years publicly proclaiming himself the “inventor of e-mail.” But this claim about e-mail—as everyone but Ayyadurai’s supporters understand the term “e-mail”—isn’t true.

Ayyadurai did write a program called “EMAIL” for use by the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (now a part of Rutgers). He copyrighted the code in 1982. But Ayyadurai today makes the far more significant claim that he invented “the electronic mail system as we know it today,” even though his code had little impact beyond the university. Mainstream tech history books don’t even mention Ayyadurai—unless you count the several books Ayyadurai has written about himself.

On the ARPAnet, the predecessor to the Internet, electronic mail conventions were well-established by the mid-1970s. Dave Crocker, one of a group of ARPAnet pioneers despised by Ayyadurai, told Ars that he wasn’t just using e-mail by 1974—he was positively addicted to it, a full three decades before the smartphone.

Yet Ayyadurai is closer than ever to creating a world in which his version of history rules. In 2016, Ayyadurai sued Gawker, which had published a biting and widely read article critical of his claims. Several months later, with Gawker in bankruptcy proceedings after losing a defamation lawsuit brought by former pro wrestler Terry “Hulk Hogan” Bollea, the site agreed to pay Ayyadurai $750,000. Two articles about Ayyadurai were deleted.

Ayyadurai then moved on to a new target. In January 2017, he sued technology blog Techdirt and its founder, Mike Masnick. With the Gawker articles gone, Masnick was Ayyadurai’s most prominent remaining critic, having published more than a dozen detailed articles attacking his claims. According to the complaint, some of the sharp-toned Techdirt articles dubbed Ayyadurai a “fraud,” “liar,” and “charlatan.”

Now, Ayyadurai and Masnick are locked in an extraordinary conflict over the history of e-mail. Each believes he is fighting for real principles, like history and the nature of truth itself. Neither is likely to back down.

The history of Ayyadurai

Shiva Ayyadurai was born in Mumbai, India, in 1963. His parents had moved to the city from the south of India in search of better opportunities. Ayyadurai grew up as a city kid, but he had more than a taste of village life, regularly visiting his grandparents in the village of Muhapur, where they worked long days farming a small plot of land.

“I went to my friend’s house to play soccer, and his mother said, ‘You can’t come in,’” Ayyadurai told us. “She gave me water in a tin cup, not the glass cup that he got. I didn’t understand. My mother told me we’re considered Shudras by the upper castes. When she went to the village well, they’d say, ‘Shoo, shoo, Shudra.’ That was almost 49 years ago, and it still affects me.”

Ayyadurai left India on his seventh birthday, landing at JFK airport on December 5, 1970. He had never seen snow before. His family moved to New Jersey, where his father had found work. At first, they lived in a rough neighborhood in Paterson. Over the next several years, the Ayyadurais moved from one town to the next seeking better schools for their kids, ultimately settling in the wealthy suburb of Livingston.

“We were these two dark-skinned kids,” Ayyadurai remembered. “These kids had better clothes. There was a lot of, frankly, prejudice at Livingston High School. They hadn’t seen an Indian kid before. I was an outsider, but I would win every award.”

Shiva Ayyadurai is adamant about telling his story on his own terms. His biography, complete with an accompanying slideshow and a conspiracy narrative, was told to Ars over the course of more than three hours. It’s a story stuffed with hard work and its resulting triumphs: Ayyadurai learned all the math his middle school had to offer before taking classes in high school; he won “every award” at Livingston High School; he mastered seven computer languages in a summer; he excelled at baseball and soccer. And he invented EMAIL—which, he insists, means he also is the “inventor” of the e-mail we use today.

In the summer of 1978, Ayyadurai’s mother, Meenakshi Ayyadurai, took him to work with her at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), where she worked as a programmer.

“My son is smart,” she told her boss, Leslie Michelson, a 31-year old experimental physicist who was in charge of networking at UMDNJ.

“Every mother says her son is smart,” replied Michelson.

Michelson’s job was to help scientists use computers for their own research. Michelson and Ayyadurai worked on HP 1000 computers. These computers, mainly designed for engineering and manufacturing, were very different from the machines commonly in use on the ARPANet at the time.

“The ARPANet was not even there, in our radar,” Ayyadurai told Ars.

Michelson gave Shiva Ayyadurai permission to work on the school’s computer systems. Ayyadurai didn’t get paid, other than a free lunch in the cafeteria. He began to write an internal electronic communications program and worked on it throughout high school. He called the program EMAIL; ultimately, he said, it grew to support 500 users.

“I worked in the lab nearly every day and also at home on our kitchen table, often until 2 am,” Ayyadurai recalls in his 2017 book, All-American Indian: This Fight Is Your Fight. Overall, I wrote nearly 50,000 lines of code across a system of 35 programs to design and implement an electronic version of that mail system, and I named it “email,” a term never before recognized in the English language.”

A family friend encouraged Ayyadurai to apply to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he enrolled in 1981. The following year, after a conversation with MIT President Paul Gray, Ayyadurai registered his EMAIL program for a US copyright.

From that point, Ayyadurai’s personal history of e-mail leaps forward several years. Asked what programs his work might have influenced, Ayyadurai cited the 1988 e-mail program Eudora as an example of something that followed his invention, without any evidence that it borrowed from him.

(Contacted by Ars earlier this year, Eudora founder Steve Dorner said he’d never heard of Ayyadurai or his claims. “It's too bad my grandmother is dead, because she could easily put all this to rest, as she told everyone I had invented e-mail,” he joked via e-mail.)

But to Ayyadurai, that’s of less importance than the copyright he obtained.

“I was issued the first US copyright for EMAIL,” he said on The Alex Jones Show earlier this year. “I was officially recognized as the inventor of email.”

We ran this claim past William Roberts, associate register of copyrights at the United States Copyright Office. “His assertion, as you describe it to me, is not accurate,” said Roberts. That’s because copyright for a computer program simply registers the precise code of that particular program, making it illegal to copy without permission.

From 1982 until 2011, there’s scant evidence that Ayyadurai spoke publicly about his claim to have invented e-mail. He had been interviewed numerous times, including in The New York Times in 1998 on the subject of e-mail. Yet during those three decades, he doesn’t appear to have claimed inventorship.

According to All-American Indian, in 2011, his mother gave her son a suitcase of materials from the late 1970s and early 1980s relating to EMAIL. The cache included documents, illustrations, and Ayyadurai’s original source code.

Ayyadurai got in touch with a Time magazine reporter named Doug Aamoth. In November 2011, Time published a Q&A with Ayyadurai, titled “The Man Who Invented Email,” on its “Techland” blog. Aamoth introduced the piece by reciting Ayyadurai’s view that the 1978 EMAIL program was when “e-mail—as we currently know it—was born.”

Within weeks of the Time piece, Ayyadurai had splashed it across the top of his own website. (Aamoth, contacted earlier this year by Ars, declined to comment on the article.)

The Time story didn’t get huge readership—but Ayyadurai’s next PR score would make a bigger impact.