Dude who claimed he invented email is told by judge: It's safe to say you didn't invent email A US district judge has dismissed the libel lawsuit entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai filed against bloggers who rubbished his claims he invented email. Judge Dennis Saylor ruled [PDF] on Wednesday that Techdirt posts that trashed Ayyadurai's claims of inventing an electronic message system we know today as email were covered by …
If you repeat something enough times people will start believing you. That's the only think his claim is based on. Even at the time he wrote his program, similar programs were already available. There is no fact behind his claims, just repeated claims. He uses methods commonly used in confidence scams.
I forgot to add, I think immigration is not a problem. I also think that in our circles, that is consensual as we all know our ancestors came from Africa anyway ... as for his alternative reality, well ... he was 14 when he implemented a messaging solution and thus has earned some arrogance, however, SMTP/POP/IMAP are the foundation of our email technology, ARE NOT his brain-child, nor an evolution of his solution ... I rest my case, as the judge did.
Please Ayyadurai, STFU, thank you.
I think all that truthfully said about Shiva Ayyadurai's claim is:
In the late 70s he developed an electronic office communication system which he called EMAIL.
He applied a skeumorphic transformation of real-world concepts (In Box, Out Box, CC, BCC, etc) to his system.
However, I don't think he can truthfully claim to have invented THE email we use today - which evolved from a completely different set of technologies.
He can claim he invented AN email system, but not THE email system (especially since electronic communications predates his invention).
At best, his was an independently conceived and implemented evolutionary dead end, which probably saw itself as a closed, rather than open, system.
Perhaps the only thing he can truly be credited for is EMAIL (unless there is evidence of earlier use of the term).
I think the point is that he didn't invent anything. He implemented an existing standard to create a program that could send an email.
Implementation != invention.
I have written a very simple program that sent SMS texts to a SMS gateway when this stuff was somewhat newish. 2 entry boxes (to & content) with a 160 character limit. And a counter to show how many characters you had left, and a print button. Simple, but effective and it stayed in use for something like a decade. Doesn't mean I invented SMS. If I had of done then i'd have implemented a better queing system and failure notification for starters.
except a phone call and an email are not zero-sum activities.
An email:
can be sent at the convenience of the sender (no having to wait to speak to someone)
can contain precise details of the issue in a handy copy-n-paste format
can contain attachments
can be dealt with at the convenience of the recipient
can be passed around internally in complex discussions
requires very little additional auditing
A phone call:
has none of the above
"The strength of mail by carrier pigeon is that the message is supplied along with a tasty treat."
OTOH, given that you have to supply the pigeon you might wish to forgo the treat. Shooting the messenger is one thing, eating it, especially when it's your own messenger, is another.
BTW The big weakness is the difficulty of supplying the pigeons to people who might wish to correspond with you.
"
A phone call:
has none of the above
"
Horses for courses.
You cannot beat a live conversation when it comes to discussing a complex issue, and such discussions are a lot faster when they involve voice communication than when they are conducted textually.
As just one example, think of discussing a medical issue with a doctor so that the doctor ends up with a reasonable diagnoses. Each answer to a question provokes a new question that is based upon the previous answer. This would require many rounds of emails, but could be achieved in a single fairly short discussion.
When the wife worked at a restaurant, and I used to dabble in coding the sinclair spectrum, I recreated her till (just for the fun of it). At they time they used fobs to sign in. So I did a slide to sign in at the bottom of the screen using a joystick and button (no mouse and the TV wasn't touch screen!!)
Wish I kept all of that, could be worth zillions now
"The public, and the courts, should not tolerate false speech, particularly when it causes people harm, and irresponsible media companies should stop using the Constitution as an excuse for their reckless dissemination of false information."
Mr President, consider yourself chastised.
Sorry, your orangeness, "chastised" means "told off".
.....will statistically type every combination of letters available however when they type a pattern that is already used to refer to an existing system it doesn't mean they get to claim they invented it.
Hes said he created a program called EMAIL in 1978, fair enough but wiki says SMTP has been about since 1971 when he would have been 7seven years old.
A seven year old contributing to the SMTP messaging system would surely have been news at the time and remembered.
It used to be that you could only rewrite history after killing everyone who might disagree, now they just go to court instead it seems.
"A seven year old contributing to the SMTP messaging system would surely have been news at the time and remembered."
I dunno - RFC821 was spectacularly simple. A bright 7-year-old using the IRC name "OldD00d1964" could have helped. After all, my son seems to know everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) about Nintendo...
Back in 1991-ish I created a multiuser chat program for computer class (no network save a shared floppy drive... oh the noises it made when running the chat). It mimicked the local multi-line BBS I was a member of at the time. Was before I knew of the Internet, That said I'm not going around telling people I created IRC or ICQ or AIM or Instant Messaging in general.
Sometime around 2006 I had an idea for a micro blogging service which one could update via SMS texts. Built a crude prototype on my home server. Didn't do anything more with it. I'm not going to claim to have invented Twitter.
Pffft, in 1986/1987, I hacked together a simple chat program on the BBC computers using the local econet network, which was considered especially cool as it could span the bridges and talk to other econet networks in the other classrooms.
I kept calling it a crap piece of code, but it took off in the school, and became known as "crappy-chat". It behaved more or less like a more simple irc.
Even then, I couldn't take credit. A friend who had used online services (I hadn't at that point) told me that a "chat program between classrooms would be cool".
I had to ask him what he meant by a chat program, as I hadn't heard of them!
Neither of us ever claimed to have invented anything.
Damn you J.G! You beat my post by seconds...
I guess you can sue me for prior art now.
Interesting screenshots, though! How did you get them?
I dumped all my econet hacking stuff to 5 1/4 inch floppy before leaving school, and have never accessed them since. I know where they are still - in a draw in a cupboard in my old bedroom at my parents house. They haven't been touched in 30 years. I wonder if they are still readable, and what I could use to read them?
I got the screenshot by *SPOOLing a few minutes in TALK while jumping between machines typing at them, then copying the file over to my PC, running BeebEm and *PRINTing the file, then taking a screen copy.
If it wasn't in MODE 7 I could have *BMPSave'd directly from the Beeb, but I haven't finished the MODE 7 conversion code.
And I've just checked my documentation for TALK, and the first working version was in Spring 1983! :)
We've all had little flashes of brilliance, some of us have worked on them and abandoned them. Over the last 35 years of working in IT I'm sure I'm invented some stuff that no one else thought of, but like most I had a real life to get on with and dead-end code is dead-end code.
Unless I have 100% proof that what I built was valid, usable and went into production of some sort, I'm not going to bother wasting my time suing someone else who may have come up with a similar idea to me at the same time but they had the balls to go out and turn into something truly workable and even financially beneficial.
"We've all had little flashes of brilliance, some of us have worked on them and abandoned them. Over the last 35 years of working in IT I'm sure I'm invented some stuff that no one else thought of"
This is the essence of programming. You're presented with a problem and you invent stuff to solve it. The core of programming patterns was the realisation that in general programmers (or, as the law calls them, persons skilled in the art), faced with a given problem, will produce similar inventions.
This should set a bar for claiming a patentable invention: it should be demonstrable that the problem has been recognised for some time and acknowledged to have not had a solution. Only in that way does it become clear that the level of originality in the invention exceeds that expected of persons skilled in the art.
I suppose one of the few examples of this is HTTP/HTTPL. It should also be salutary to realise that it wasn't simply the invention itself that made the web successful; it was making it freely available. Without that it would have had as little effect as the patent of BTs which seems to have simply sat on the shelf until someone decided to try to use it to cash in on other people's work in producing working code.
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