Almost all of us know what email is. A few of us can explain its history. And very few of us can actually articulate how it works. But there's one Indian-born scientist who says he's got all the answers. Oh, and he also claims to have invented it too.
Shiva Ayyadurai, a 50-year-old United States-based bio-scientist, has recently published a book challenging claims that the American computer programmer Ray Tomlinson invented email. Instead, Ayyadurai insists he's the brains behind the creation.
According to Ayyadurai, Tomlinson's 1971 creation was a primitive form of text messaging. Ayyadurai goes on to say that he invented what we know as email back in 1978 when he was a 14-year-old boy helping out the Newark dental school where his mother worked.
And people seem to be digesting the news in different ways. While his claims have caused outrage throughout the IT world, Ayyadurai has been backed by the likes of Deepak Chopra, the new age spiritual guru, and India's new prime minister Narendra Modi who has posed for photographs with Ayyadurai. Mr. Modi has asserted that many Western inventions, including aircraft, were actually discovered by Indian scientists thousands of years earlier.
Ayyadurai is a lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He copyrighted the term 'email' in 1982 but did not patent it because, he says, it was not possible to patent software at that time.
He insists his creation was in fact an inter-office mail system with an inbox and was called 'email.'
According to Ayyadurai, Ray Tomlinson's creation allowed users on different computers connected to the primitive ARPANET, a precursor to the Inter, to send messages to each other. It used the @ symbol to identify the computer from which it was being sent. Ayyadurai insists the symbol was all it had in common with the modern email system he created.
In an interview with India's Economic times newspaper, he said he would take his claims "directly to the people" in place of technology specialists or taking legal action.
He said, "In 1978 there was a 14-year-old boy working in Newark. He did in fact create the inter-office mail system and called it email. What they did before 1978 was text messaging. The facts are coming out now in 2014."
