Indian boy who invented email

Indian boy who invented email

Even the best brains in computer and software engineering may not be able to answer if you ask them who invented email. This was illustrated on Sunday when this writer checked the same with Prof Achuthsankar S Nair, Director, State Inter-University Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics, Government of Kerala and Dr Iyemperumal, Executive Director, Tamil Nadu State Science and Technology Centre. Both of them expressed their helplessness even though both of them handle hundreds of email messages per day.




It is a 14-year-old boy from India and that too with roots in Tamil Nadu who invented email as well as the five-letter word which has become synonymous with communication. VA Shiva Ayyadurai, hardly out of school in New Jersey, ushered in the paperless era into this world. It was in response to a challenge thrown at him by Dr Leslie P Michelson, Director, High Performance Computing Lab, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), in Newark, New Jersey, which made little Shiva create the world's first email system in November 1978.


“The UMDNJ was a big campus connected by a wide area computer network. The computer was in its initial stages of being used in the office environment. Dr Michelson wanted me to create an electronic version of the interoffice mail system so that the entire staff of doctors, secretaries, students and staff could communicate faster.


At that time, secretaries and staff were performing drafting, typing, copying, hand delivering of the entire paper-based mail. By observing the interoffice mail system, I created a parts list: Inbox, Outbox, Memo, Folders, Address Book, Attachments, and then created a computer programme of nearly 50,000 lines of computer code which replicated this entire system. I called my innovation ‘email’, a term that had never been used before. The world’s first email I sent was to Dr Michelson in November 1978,” Dr Ayyadurai told The Pioneer on Sunday.


Dr Ayyadurai developed email as a software programme. “Software itself was a new concept then. In 1978, it was not even covered under the Intellectual Property Rights. The US Copyright Law of 1976 was amended, however, in 1980 to allow for the protection of software. In 1982, I was awarded the first US Copyright for ‘Email’, recognising me as the inventor of email by the US Government,” said Dr Ayyadurai, who holds four different Post Graduate degrees including a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


“What you see in any email system today, the Inbox, Outbox, Address Book, the Memo (From, To, Date, Subject, Body, CC and BCC), Attachments, etc are based on my observations to replicate the interoffice mail system. In November 1978, as a 14-year-old school boy, I addressed the doctors of the University on what I invented and demonstrated the use of this entire system,” reminiscences Dr Ayyadurai, son of Vellayappa Ayyadurai, a chemical engineer hailing from Rajapalayam in Tamil Nadu and Meenakshi, a mathematics teacher who went on to become the head of the elite Don Bosco Public School in Mumbai.


The Ayyadurais migrated to the USA in 1970 in search of greater challenges so that little Shiva could get better education and exposure. He did not let his parents down. By the age of 13 he had mastered all known computer programming languages in vogue and went on to create email, which revolutionised the world of communication.
Dr Ayyadurai has come out with a book The Email Revolution: Unleashing The Power of Connect which has foreword by Dr Leslie Michelson and an introduction by none other than Prof Noam Chomsky. He is in India as part of his mission to identify more “Shivas” who have much better innovations to offer to the world.


“Young people of all colors, hungry to make this world a better place, are going to innovate things we’ve never imagined. We have to provide more global images to young people, in India, for example, with icons, beyond just white skinned and white haired, bearded scientists,” said Dr Ayyadurai.


And how many of us are aware of the fact that radio was invented by Prof Jagdish Chandra Bose? It was his failure to get it patented that cost Dr Bose the title. Marconi, who had seen Dr Bose’s public demonstration of the radio, had approached him with an irresistible offer to market the same. But Dr Bose wanted the radio to be used for the welfare of the humanity. The night he held the public demonstration, his equipment was robbed from his hotel room. The rest is history,” Prof Ranjit Nair, leading physicist, had told this writer. So, today we all think Marconi, an Italian, invented Radio.


But, when it comes to email, it's time to set the record straight, once and for all — it was a boy, a 14-year-old Indian boy, who invented email. The facts are black and white.



Source:Indian boy who invented email

Electronic mail, most commonly referred to as email or e-mail since ca. 1993, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to a mail server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.


Historically, the term electronic mail was used generically for any electronic document transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to describe fax document transmission. As a result, it is difficult to find the first citation for the use of the term with the more specific meaning it has today.


An Internet email message consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time stamp.


Originally a text-only (ASCII) communications medium, Internet email was extended to carry, e.g. text in other character sets, multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC 2045 through 2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). Subsequent RFC's have proposed standards for internationalized email addresses using UTF-8.


Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it,[5] but the history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET. Standards for encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. An email sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to a basic text message sent on the Internet today.


Email is an information and communications technology. It uses technology to communicate a digital message over the Internet. Users use email differently, based on how they think about it. There are many software platforms available to send and receive. Popular email platforms include Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and many others.


Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separate from the message (header and body) itself.

Email - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Who Invented Email, Email History, How Email Was Invented
The history of email began with Ray Tomlinson in 1971. The program was created while he was working for the US government, specifically ARPANET (the future Internet).


Tomlinson’s Work


Tomlinson was working for the United States Defense Department in 1968. He was a computer engineer at the time. He started by developing an application called SNDMSG. Its purpose was to let ARPANET users relay messages. Originally, SNDMSG was local. That is, the messages could be sent only to users of that same computer.


Tomlinson used the CYPNET (a transfer protocol) on the SNDMSG application. This allowed SNDMSG to send and receive email to any computer within the ARPANET network. This was how the history of email began.


The First Email Message


Tomlinson utilized the @ symbol for a simple reason: it would enable him to know which individual was at the system. Back them, the @ was inserted between the computer host and the user name. The first email Tomlinson sent was QWERTYUIOP.
Who Invented Email?

Yes, by 1978, people were already sending electronic messages across computer networks, but Ayyadurai says he was the first person to build a software program called “email” — and that he was the first to structure electronic communications in a way that mirrored methods traditionally used to move paper mail through an office, setting up electronic “inboxes” and “outboxes” and “address books.”




In February, after some documentation supporting Ayyadurai’s claims was accepted by the Smithsonian, The Washington Post ran a long profile of the MIT lecturer, describing him as the father of email. But after many objected to his claims, the paper published a mammoth correction, casting considerable doubt over Ayyadurai’s place in the history of email.


Some trace email all the way back to the mid-’60s and MIT’s Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS). Originally, CTSS let users remotely log into a single MIT computer and store files to discs where they could be accessed by others, and then in 1961, Tom Van Vleck developed a “mail” command that let users send electronic messages to other users of the system.


But some argue that this wasn’t really email because the messages never left a single machine, that they didn’t really go across a network. They say true email arrived several years later on the ARPAnet, the research network funded by the US Department of Defense that would eventually give rise to the internet. In 1971, a man named Ray Tomlinson built a messaging system atop the ARPAnet that sent electronic messages between machines.
Speaking with Wired, he points out that you could call the telegraph a form of email as well.


In addition to soliciting the backing of Chomsky, Ayyadurai has enlisted the help of his old boss the University of Medical and Dentistry of New Jersey, Leslie Michelson, and he has set up a website to support his claims: VA Shiva Ayyadurai - The Inventor of Email.


Why is he fighting so hard to stake his claim? “I want to be clear,” Ayyadurai tells Wired. “The intention of my sharing the facts was not about getting name and money for the invention of email, but to share what I thought was an inspiring message that even something as grand as email, could get created under the right conditions. What was unfortunate was the reaction.”
Who Invented Email? Just Ask ? Noam Chomsky | Enterprise | WIRED
Email is much older than ARPANet or the Internet. It was never invented; it evolved from very simple beginnings.


Early email was just a small advance on what we know these days as a file directory - it just put a message in another user's directory in a spot where they could see it when they logged in. Simple as that. Just like leaving a note on someone's desk.


Probably the first email system of this type was MAILBOX, used at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1965. Another early program to send messages on the same computer was called SNDMSG.


Some of the mainframe computers of this era might have had up to one hundred users -often they used what are called "dumb terminals" to access the mainframe from their work desks. Dumb terminals just connected to the mainframe - they had no storage or memory of their own, they did all their work on the remote mainframe computer.


Before internetworking began, therefore, email could only be used to send messages to various users of the same computer. Once computers began to talk to each other over networks, however, the problem became a little more complex - We needed to be able to put a message in an envelope and address it. To do this, we needed a means to indicate to whom letters should go that the electronic posties understood - just like the postal system, we needed a way to indicate an address.


This is why Ray Tomlinson is credited with inventing email in 1972. Like many of the Internet inventors, Tomlinson worked for Bolt Beranek and Newman as an ARPANET contractor. He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote sending messages from one computer to another. So then, for anyone using Internet standards, it was simply a matter of nominating name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer. Internet pioneer Jon Postel, who we will hear more of later, was one of the first users of the new system, and is credited with describing it as a "nice hack". It certainly was, and it has lasted to this day. History of email