Recognizing the Second
Generation Inventors II
E-mail is the direct fallout to the
invention of Internet system. E-mail is one major invention that globally
revolutionized communication in the 1980/90s. Email is the direct translation
of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Today, E-mail
is almost replacing the conventional way of letter writing and postage as it is
more than 100 times faster, legible, cost - effective and indispensible. I can vividly
remember in the late 1990s when many of us queued up at the old Senate building
of Ahmadu Bello University Zaria with our floppy diskettes to receive or send
E-mail via the then single university E-mail system. At that time, visiting
E-mail office was a daily occurrence and part of our daily lives. Still, we
were very happy for it as it allowed us send messages across the globe and
receive feedbacks at the fastest possible time. Compare that scenario with
today’s podcast and different kind of electronic media for written and verbal
communication on real-time basis. Who invented E-mail System?
The answer to this question is not as
straight as it should be. Invention of E-mail is no doubt a groundbreaking
achievement attained by humanity. Controversy, claims and counter claims surround
this important human breakthrough, E-mail invention. This is quite understandable
for such a zenith level in the global ICT. Going by the record http://www.inventorofemail.com/history_of_email.asp, it was reported that in 1978, a teenager
of 14 years of age, named V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai developed a computer program.
The program was able to replicate the features of the interoffice,
inter-organizational paper mail system. He named his program “EMAIL”. Shiva
filed an application to obtain a copyright for the program in 1982. The United
States Copyright Office followed due process and issued a Certificate of Registration
with a number; TXu-111-775 to Shiva for the program. As required by the
Regulations of the Copyright Office, he deposited portions of the original
source code with the program. Prominent in the code is the name “EMAIL” that he
gave to the program. He received a second Certificate of Registration, No.
TXu-108-715, for the “EMAIL User’s Manual” he had prepared to accompany the
program. The manual simplified the use of EMAIL that taught unsophisticated users
how to use EMAIL’s features. At the time of this invention, however, there were
pockets of similar peats in communication system and subsystems among widely
dispersed computers. Those system and subsystems were primitive and their usage
was largely confined to computer scientists and specialists. It was Shiva’s
work that made it possible for the generality of people to use paperless mail
in a form of E-mail. When and how did Shiva start it?
It was in the summer of 1978, Shiva was recruited
for programming assignments at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New
Jersey (UMDNJ) in Newark, New Jersey. One of his supervisors, Dr. Leslie P. Michelson,
recognized Shiva’s abilities/potentials and challenged him to translate the
conventional paper-based interoffice and inter-organizational communication
system (that is, paper-based mail and memoranda) to an electronic communication
system. Shiva envisioned something simpler, something that everyone, from
secretary to CEO, could use to quickly and reliably send and receive digital
messages. Shiva embraced the project and began by performing a thorough
evaluation of UMDNJ's paper-based mail system, the same as that used in offices
and organizations around the world. He determined that the essential features
of these systems included functions corresponding to “Inbox”, “Outbox”,
“Drafts”, “Memo” (“To:”, “From:”, “Date:”, “Subject:”, “Body:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”),
“Attachments”, “Folders”, “Compose”, “Forward”, “Reply”, “Address Book”,
“Groups”, “Return Receipt”, “Sorting”. These capabilities were all to be
provided in a software program having a sufficiently simple interface that
needed no expertise in computer systems to use efficiently to “Send” and
“Receive” mail electronically. It is these features that make his program
“email” and that distinguish “email” from prior electronic communications.
Shiva went on to be recognized by the Westinghouse Science Talent Search Honors
Group for his invention. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology highlighted
his invention as one among four, in the incoming freshman class of 1,040
students.
Despite this clear and unambiguous record,
there was insinuation that Shiva did not deserve the recognition for being the
E-mail inventor. Washington post, a refutable USA based paper reported an
interview with Mr. Shiva where the paper wrote “Based on false claims, over the
past year (since the acceptance of Shiva's documents into the Smithsonian),
industry insiders have chosen to launch an irrational denial of the invention.
There is no direct dispute of the invention Copyright, but rather inaccurate
claims, false statements, and personal attacks waged against Shiva. Attackers
are attempting to discredit him, and his life's work. He has received
threatening phone calls, unfair online comments, and his name and work has been
maligned. It is but a sad commentary that a vocal minority has elected to
hijack his accomplishment, apparently not satisfied with the recognition they
have already received for their contributions to the field of text messaging.
Following the Smithsonian news, they went into action. They began historical
revisionism on their own “History of Electronic Mail” to hide the facts”.
In another account documented by Wikipedia;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Tomlinson, stated that Raymond Samuel
"Ray" Tomlinson (April 23, 1941 – March 5, 2016) was credited as the
first American computer programmer who implemented the first email program on
the ARPANET system as the aftermath of the Internet invention in 1971. The
record claimed that Ray was/is internationally known and credited as the
inventor of E-mail. It was the first system able to send mail between users on
different hosts connected to ARPANET. Hitherto, mail could be sent only to
others who used the same computer. To achieve this, Ray used the @ sign to
separate the user name from the name of their machine, a scheme which has been
used in E-mail addresses ever since. The Internet Hall of Fame in its account
of his work commented, "Tomlinson's E-mail program brought about a
complete revolution, fundamentally changing the way people communicate". The
ARPANET claim of E-mail invention was countered by a website; http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp#False-Claim, which stated, “Email was created at
UMDNJ, not on the ARPANET”. It further stated “This quote, “Under ARPANET
several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to
send simple messages to another person across the network,” [1] is a misuse of
the term “email.” The invention referenced here is command-line protocols for
transferring text messages, not email as defined to be a system of interlocking
parts, such as the 1978 EMAIL platform, a full-scale emulation of the
interoffice inter-organizational paper mail system. As the related references
show, early workers in the field of electronic messaging had no intention to
create a full-scale electronic version of interoffice or inter-organizational paper
mail system and in fact were not even allowed to work on creating an electronic
system to replicate “letters”, e.g the interoffice memo”. Well, this is so much
ado on E-mail invention; the fact remains that the names of Shiva and Ray may
continue to rank high whenever the history of E-mail is being discussed at
different forums.
The next invention that uses Internet
service for communication between and among people is “Facebook”. Who is the
inventor of Facebook? Unlike E-mail, Facebook invention is unanimously credited
to another teenager of 19 years old “Mark
Zuckerberg” in 2004. Facebook is a social networking service launched on
February 4, 2004. The inventor started using Facebook with his college roommate
and fellow Harvard University students. The website's membership was initially
limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges
in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and gradually most universities in the United
States and Canada corporations. By September 2006, Facebook was freely
available to Internet users with a valid email address along with an age
requirement limit of being 13 and older. How was the Facebook Invented? (To be continued next week)
