Washington: Email turned 32 on Saturday, with Indian-American V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai still to get credit for the system he created when he was just 14. In 1978, Ayyadurai created a computer programme, which he called “email,” that replicated all the functions of an interoffice mail system: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachments, Address Book, among others. These features are now integral to every email system.
On August 30, 1982, the US government officially recognised Ayyadurai as the inventor of email by awarding him the first US Copyright for Email for his 1978 invention. The Huffington Post, in a commemorative series to mark the occasion, wrote: “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,”
Speaking to the newspaper, Mr Ayyadurai said: “The reality is this: In 1978, there was a 14-year-old boy and he was the first to create electronic office system. He called it email, a term that had never been used before, and then he went and got official recognition by the US government.” Ayyadurai was born to a Tamil family in Bombay. At the age of seven, he left with his family to live in the US. At 14, he attended a special summer programme at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University to study computer programming, and went on to graduate from Livingston High School in Livingston, New Jersey.
While attending high school, he also worked at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey as a research fellow. Ayyadurai’s talent impressed Dr Leslie Michelson, then director of the Laboratory Computer Network at UMDNJ. He gave Ayyadurai a challenge: to convert the old system of paper-based mail communications used at the university to an electronic one.
This complex office-to-office communications, the interoffice mail system, was used in nearly every office including those of presidents and prime ministers.
Mr Ayyadurai closely 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 he conceived an electronic version of this system. He created a computer programme of over 50,000 lines of code, which electronically replicated all the features of the interoffice mail system. The code was later turned over the the Smithsonian Institute.
There have been many critics who have dated the system of email to 1971, when a programmer at the ARPANET sent a text message between two computers. Mr Ayyadurai's former colleague Robert Field explained defended Ayyadurai in a blog on The Huffington Post. According to Field, “multi-billion dollar defence company” Raytheon BBN Technologies generated “their entire brand ... based on claims of having ‘invented email’,” and then unleashed a PR campaign to “discredit email’s origins” as well as Shiva's claim to having invented it. Mr Ayyadurai himself explained in an interview on Thursday that he thinks these allegations stem from people who are both economically and racially prejudiced.
