Huffington Post Finally Responds, Stands By Its Completely Bogus, Totally Debunked 'History Of Email' Series
from the destroying-all-journalistic-integrity dept
Over the past couple of days we've been writing about an incredibly questionable series of articles at Huffington Post, pretending to be about the "history of email" even though they're not. They're actually a completely bogus rewriting of well-documented history to falsely pretend that a guy named V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email as a 14-year-old boy. He did not. Not only do Ayyadurai and some of his friends totally misrepresent reality, they fraudulently make claims that are easily debunked. As we've discussed, their two biggest claims are (1) that the "US government officially recognized Ayyaudurai as the inventor of email" in 1982 and (2) that a leading analysis of electronic messaging in 1977, by Dave Crocker at RAND, claims that a full interoffice email system is "impossible." Both of these claims are absolutely false.
As we've explained, the first one relies on blatantly misleading people about what a copyright is and what Ayyadurai copyrighted. Copyright does not cover "inventions." It only covers creative expression. What Ayyadurai got a copyright on is a specific computer program called "email." That does not mean he invented email. Just as Microsoft holds a copyright on "Windows" but did not invent windowed user interfaces, Ayyadurai did not invent email. The copyright does not mean that he did invent email, and the fact that he and his friends continue to pretend that a copyright is something it is not is farcical. They are relying on the ignorance of reporters and the public about what a copyright is. The second issue is even more damaging. Ayyadurai and his friends claim that Crocker's paper is the "smoking gun" that proves that no one else was working on a full email system at the time. And yet, as we noted, they never actually link to the paper. We did. You can read it here, and you see that not only does it say the exact opposite of what they claim (debunking Ayyadurai's claims), they deliberately misrepresent what Crocker said by taking two separate sentences, from different pages in the report, removing the context around them, and mashing them together to pretend they say something they do not. It's shameless.
In our first post, we claimed that perhaps it's true that Ayyadurai was the first person to shorten "electronic mail" (which was in widespread use at the time) to "email" -- but now even that has been called into question. Computer historian Thomas Haigh has been tracking Ayyadurai's lies and misrepresentations for years, and alerts us to the fact that Ayyadurai's story has notably changed over the years, revealing additional misrepresentations and attempts to change history. This includes, among other things, him changing his story about when he completed his work -- and when his program "email" was named. Here's Haigh's analysis:
“Electronic mail” was widely discussed in the 1970s, but was usually shortened simply to “MAIL” when naming commands. However, the Oxford English Dictionary (3rd edition online) gives a June 1979 usage (“Postal Service pushes ahead with E-mail”) so Ayyadurai was not the first to use this contraction in print.
The program name “EMAIL” is not mentioned in the 1980 newspaper article on Ayyadurai but does appear in his 1981 Westinghouse competition submission. By that year the name EMAIL was in use by CompuServe. Compuserve had offered timesharing computer access and electronic mail to businesses for years. In 1979 it launched a new service, aiming to sell otherwise wasted evening computer time to consumers for the bargain price of $5 an hour. A trademark application (later abandoned) that CompuServe made for “EMAIL” listed 1981/04/01 as its first use by the company, which fits with this May 1981 message mentioning CompuServe’s “EMAIL program.” By January 1983 “Email™” (for trademark) was part of CompuServe’s advertising campaign.
For years CompuServe users could type “GO EMAIL” to read their messages. Whether Ayyadurai or CompuServe was the first to adopt “EMAIL” as a program name it is clear that CompuServe popularized it.
Furthermore, Haigh details how Ayyadurai has conveniently tried to rewrite his own history to counter the debunkings. For example, in 2011, he originally claimed that while he was "challenged" to create an electronic interoffice messaging system in 1978, he didn't actually get it to work until 1980. But, of course, by then email was much more widespread. So, Ayyadurai changed the story, and pretended that he was both challenged and wrote his "50,000 lines of code" and got it all working in 1978. Furthermore, as we noted in our second post, Ayyadurai and his friends are now trying to rewrite history to ignore all those other previous email systems by tightly defining what an email system is such that only his qualifies. But, as we noted, most of the features he listed are arbitrary and unrelated to the basics of email. All of the core elements of email were widely used before Ayyadurai wrote his system. Haigh details how Ayyadurai has taken this to absolutely ridiculous extremes, claiming that it's not email unless it has 87 specific features (up from 32, which was ratcheted up from an original 6 -- as he continues to revise history):
One of the five main tabs on Ayyadurai’s new site is “Definition of email.” This presents a short version (“email is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based email system”) and two lengthy checklists. The first checklist presents 32 distinct features of the traditional mail system, all of which he claims were necessary (“if any one component was taken away…you no longer had a functioning interoffice mail system.”) The second checklist repeats these, with some additional items added, and places a check mark by each one to indicate that Ayyadurai’s system had that capability. There are 87 of these check marks. If I understand his argument correctly then this signifies that a system must possess 87 specific features to properly be called email.
Has this definition been widely accepted since 1978, as Ayyadurai claims? No it has not. Indeed, Ayyadurai’s own website did not include these definitions of email until recently. The old site (prior to June 2012) offered a quite different six point definition of “an E-Mail System.” These six points were: User-Friendly Interface; A Rich Set of Features; Network Wide; Security and Login; Enterprise Management; Database and Archival. The definition was originally presented as the work of one Matthew J. Labrador. Labrador claims to have “met Shiva in 1981 in a computer science class” and to have been impressed by his modesty. He recently been motivated by inaccurate reports on email origins to “do my own research… to provide readers with a more comprehensive and holistic history.” Ayyudari’s resume lists Labrador as a student whose bachelor’s thesis he supervised in 1990. Labrador, whose prose style closely resembles Ayyadurai’s own, expressed awe at Ayyadurai’s accomplishments (“in writing this History, I was amazed at the vision that Dr. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai had even as a 13 year old, in developing that first E-Mail system”), acknowledged his graciousness in providing materials, and proceeded to show that Ayyadurai’s system met this unorthodox six point definition.
Either way, given the abundant evidence that Ayyadurai's claim is complete bullshit, we were still left amazed that Huffington Post has allowed this to remain on its site.
Late yesterday, a PR person from Huffington Post finally got back to me, claiming they did not get my original email. Huffington Post not only stupidly stands by the completely false story, it claims that the matter is okay because they've "updated each piece with a clarification." The clarification is not a "clarification" and it's not an apology for publishing a totally bullshit series. It's merely a repeating of Ayyadurai's lies. Incredibly, they repeat his exact language, suggesting the "clarification" is either from him directly, or taken from the claims in the bogus articles.
*Clarification about the series: Electronic messaging predates email. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky in 2012, email, spelled uppercase or lowercase, as defined in 1978, was a computer program which was the first full-scale electronic version of the interoffice mail system (Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Folders, Attachments, etc.), containing the integrated features of what we experience today in "email" programs. However, this is not to imply that prior to the invention of email in 1978, simple methods of computer-to-computer or device-to-device electronic messaging did not exist. In fact such methods of sending text messages electronically -- text messaging -- could be said to date back to the Morse code telegraph of the mid-1800s; or the 1939 World's Fair where IBM sent a message of congratulations from San Francisco to New York on an IBM radio-type, calling it a "high-speed substitute for mail service in the world of tomorrow." The original text message, electronic transfer of content or images, ARPANET messaging, and even the familiar "@" sign were used in primitive electronic computer-to-computer messaging systems. While the technology pioneers who created these messaging systems should be heralded for their efforts, and given credit for their specific accomplishments and contributions, these early computer-to-computer messaging programs were clearly not email, the system of interconnected parts intended to emulate the interoffice mail system. There is much credit to spread around to the vast community of academic, industrial and military researchers and engineers who eclipsed the industrial revolution with their contributions to computer science and computer and network engineering. There is no intention to take credit where it is not due. However, email as we know and experience it today, not electronic messaging, was first created in 1978 at UMDNJ.
Except, this is equally misleading. The systems in place long before 1978 absolutely were "electronic mail" and absolutely "emulated the interoffice mail system." "Email as we know it" was absolutely not first created at 1978 at UMDNJ and any basic reading of the actual documentation would prove that. I asked Huffington Post's PR people if they really wanted to make this statement, pointing out that it would only make them look silly. For reasons I cannot fathom, they appear to be standing by it and have not yet replied.
Furthermore, this completely misleading and factually bogus "clarification" has not, in fact, been placed on all of the articles in this series. This HuffPost Live article by Emily Tess Katz does not include it at all, but rather repeats many long-disproved claims by Ayyadurai. Apparently Katz tweeted that she stands behind the article, but later deleted that tweet. I asked her again last night if she still stood by the article, but, par for the course, she has not replied.
Huffington Post's PR people further told me that (1) it had not received any money for publishing the series (i.e., it's not a sponsored post) and (2) that "the authors declared no financial interest." Oh really? As I've pointed out, Larry Weber is one of the biggest names in PR. He didn't just magically decide to write an entire series of blatant falsehoods about the history of email. In fact, it didn't take much sleuthing to discover that Ayyadurai and Weber are business partners in "EchoMail", the company that Ayyadurai also likes to insist was a major part of email's history (it wasn't). Ayyadurai claims that EchoMail "grew to nearly $200 million in market valuation" but provides no evidence for that. Was the company public? Where does this valuation come from? For such an important company, you'd think there'd be a lot more information online about it, but there's basically none. The Wikipedia page for it says that EchoMail is a "subsidiary of General Interactive, but was initially developed under Information Cybernetics." The only "citation" to support these claims is this page at General Interactive. However, General Interactive appears to just be yet another (in an increasingly long list) of websites of questionable businesses that appear to do nothing but promote... V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai.
For such a big company, you'd assume there'd be some press reports somewhere. So far, I can find none. It's possible they exist, but they are not readily available. It's not hard, however, to find news reports on other big companies of that generation. Either way, Echomail notes that companies like American Express and IBM are customers. It somehow leaves out that the only confirmation I can find of this is a lawsuit EchoMail filed against both companies in 2005. So, at least they were customers, though it doesn't appear to have ended on friendly terms.
Basically, no matter where you start to dig in, nearly everything about Ayyadurai's claims is incredibly sketchy, or outright disproven and debunked widely. It's incredible that Huffington Post has decided to stand by this and merely repeat debunked claims. Even if, as some have claimed, the posts by Weber, Ayyadurai and their friends are on the "unedited" blogs section of HuffPo, the HuffPo Live pieces are a part of the "news" business, and they are reporting blatantly false information.
As per usual, Ayyadurai himself refuses to address any of this other than pointing back to the same debunked claims. His Twitter feed is hilarious, just constantly repeating claims, in a foot stamping manner, sometimes referring to himself in the third person.
No evidence, no support. And, of course, BBN doesn't claim to have "invented email." Like pretty much everyone else, BBN notes that it was among those who made significant contributions to a large group effort that became email.
Oh, and there's also this amusing tweet in which Ayyadurai appears to be implying that we're paid off by Raytheon for writing this.
We're curious if Ayyadurai would like to try to present any evidence that a giant defense contractor is paying us off to (1) explain basic copyright law and (2) point to the actual 1977 paper that Ayyadurai himself totally misrepresents. Because we'd like to see him try.
In the meantime, the folks over at Huffington Post (the ones who still believe in journalistic integrity) might want to take a closer look at what's going on over there.
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Filed Under: email, huffpo live, inventor of email, journalistic integrity, larry weber, shiva ayyadurai, v.a. shiva ayyadurai
Companies: huffington post
Reader Comments
The First Word
“A quote that sums this up
"Not everything on the internet is true."-Abraham Lincoln
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You're arguing with the Puffington Host!
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...
"The systems in place long before 1978 absolutely were "electronic mail" and absolutely "emulated the interoffice mail system.""
Next thing you know he'll be claiming to have invented e-mail when he was one year old. Just like Al Gore invented the Internet too.
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A quote that sums this up
-Abraham Lincoln
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Leaving them largely paralyzed as they try and figure out what they want to do next.
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Mythology isn't just for HuffPo
Al Gore and the Internet
By Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf
Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet and to promote and support its development.
No one person or even small group of persons exclusively “invented” the Internet. It is the result of many years of ongoing collaboration among people in government and the university community. But as the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore’s contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time.
Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: “During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” We don’t think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he “invented” the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship. Though easily forgotten, now, at the time this was an unproven and controversial concept. Our work on the Internet started in 1973 and was based on even earlier work that took place in the mid-late 1960s. But the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication. As an example, he sponsored hearings on how advanced technologies might be put to use in areas like coordinating the response of government agencies to natural disasters and other crises.
As a Senator in the 1980s Gore urged government agencies to consolidate what at the time were several dozen different and unconnected networks into an “Interagency Network.” Working in a bi-partisan manner with officials in Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s administrations, Gore secured the passage of the High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991. This “Gore Act” supported the National Research and Education Network (NREN) initiative that became one of the major vehicles for the spread of the Internet beyond the field of computer science.
As Vice President Gore promoted building the Internet both up and out, as well as releasing the Internet from the control of the government agencies that spawned it. He served as the major administration proponent for continued investment in advanced computing and networking and private sector initiatives such as Net Day. He was and is a strong proponent of extending access to the network to schools and libraries. Today, approximately 95% of our nation’s schools are on the Internet. Gore provided much-needed political support for the speedy privatization of the Internet when the time arrived for it to become a commercially-driven operation.
There are many factors that have contributed to the Internet’s rapid growth since the later 1980s, not the least of which has been political support for its privatization and continued support for research in advanced networking technology. No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President. Gore has been a clear champion of this effort, both in the councils of government and with the public at large.
The Vice President deserves credit for his early recognition of the value of high speed computing and communication and for his long-term and consistent articulation of the potential value of the Internet to American citizens and industry and, indeed, to the rest of the world.
Version 1.2
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No response from Deborah J. Nightingale either
I can't say I was around for the beginning of email, but I do consider myself a bit of a domain expert, having worked on several email systems throughout my career including Lotus cc:Mail, Lotus Notes, Claris Emailer, Microsoft Outlook Express, Entourage, and Yahoo Mail.
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Große Lüge
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*Software Developer hands program to Ayyadurai*
*Ayyadurai looks at program in his hand*
Ayyadurai: "I made this."
Huffington Post *ORGASM*
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I'm in a TechDirt article!!
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I doubt they're stupid enough to try and remove the traces of it though.
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There are two major problems with this comparison:
1) Gore never claimed to have invented the internet
2) When people started saying that he did claim that, he didn't devolve into batshit insanity in his attempt to continue to make a claim he never made in the first place.
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Re: Mythology isn't just for HuffPo
and Obama was talking about and promoting government transparency before he got elected. Just because some politician was talking about and 'promoting' what their constituents want to hear so that they can get elected doesn't give them credit for anything.
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HuffPro is delusional.
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Something to be said for an Editoral Staff that actually edits before publishing
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Al Gore presented as a legitimate example of a BETTER way to handle something.
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Maybe he did invent email
But that doesn't mean Ayyadurai didn't invent email long after that.
It is quite possible, if he was 14 years old, that he hadn't heard about the many pre-existing email systems, and independently re-invented it. After all, email is a pretty obvious thing to do once you have a computer network.
I, too, invented many common & important technologies ( http://mugwumpery.com/?p=443 ).
It's just that I wasn't the first to do it.
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It's a truly funny story, and more over what Huffington Post seems to be doing is ignoring reality - which in turn makes you wonder how many other stories they do it on. It makes upworthy seem reliable.
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Re: Re: Mythology isn't just for HuffPo
Gore does, in fact, deserve the credit that they give him, and he particularly deserves it because he consistently supported the idea even when it was somewhere between "unpopular", "unproven" and "science fiction".
As to the bogus mythology, I posted this link yesterday, but apparently I need to post it again:
http://metaphorical.wordpress.com/2007/02/20/how-a-journalist-invented-that-al-gore-invented-t he-internet/
Read. Learn.
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Re: Maybe he did invent email
Webster: in·vent
verb \in-ˈvent\
: to create or produce (something useful) for the first time.
So, no, he/you did not invent something if he/you weren't first. Redefining words to mean what you want them to mean doesn't count.
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You got that wrong.
You mean "Just as Microsoft [...] did not invent holes in a wall preferably protected with glass panes, [...]".
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V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, false server god
After performing an exorcism on the server I now only use twitter and Facebook for electronic messaging. (aka email)
Best thing I've ever done, now I never get SPAM from V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai flawed email invention.
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Train google autocomplete to set the record straight!
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Somebody needs to say the word
There, I said it. Now if he uses his claim to promote anything with a financial payback, he is committing fraud and should be held to account. Do that and watch his defenders scatter like cockroaches.
Oh, and I invented ice cream back in 2002.
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A group of multi-billion dollar companies are engaged in a decades long conspiracy to steal credit for something they make little if any money from because they are filthy racists.
Or
One guy who's entire source of income is related to perpetuating the story that he invented email is completely full of shit.
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One thing that's particular galling...
Unlike this utterly worthless asshole Ayyadurai, Crocker has had a profound, sustained, and enormously positive impact on the Internet's email ecosystem for decades. His name is all over the standards, and there's a reason for that: I don't think there's anybody on the planet who understands the subject matter better than he does. He participates in IETF working groups, he writes, he debates, he explains, and is one of the best possible people to learn from.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that Crocker is to email as Berners-Lee is to the web. (And I don't mean to minimize the contributions of others: there are a long list of people mentioned in Partridge's excellent piece and they are all part of the story too.)
So it really pisses me off to see this fine, brilliant man's words twisted in such a clearly dishonest fashion.
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It was simply time.
This is how you can have multiple people "inventing" the same thing at the same time all independent of each other.
It is simply time.
The jerk in question deserves credit for being able to do what everyone else did. The fact that he is a big jerk and wants to claim exclusive rights to it doesn't undo the significance of his work.
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However, this isn't the case with Ayyadurai. Email was invented years before he wrote his program.
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Re: Große Lüge
The problems of the huffer should be apparent regardless. Sloppy research on source and claims is to blame.
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HUFFINGTON POST
its a fantasy Rag
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End game?
This kind of PR is expensive, and while his apparent current connection with woomaster Deepak Chopra is no doubt profitable, it just doesn't make sense to me to devote so much time, effort, and money selling a lie. Then again, people are buying it. And sense doesn't always prevail. Maybe it's just a cult.
And now I wonder if any of his other claims of invention and innovation are also false...
Full disclosure: I once interviewed for a job at a federal agency whose offices were located on a Raytheon campus. They paid for my parking. /cabal_shill
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If only a couple of major companies buckle rather than fight (and many do), he'll reap millions.
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Re: End game?
It's because he's drumming up business for his recently released book "The Email Revolution".
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Re: Re: Maybe he did invent email
Look at Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell.
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First comment
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Similar Experience with Huff Post
I e-mailed them & still haven't received any kind of a response. These kinds of situations concern me because, even with presented with clear, contradictory evidence, all of the effort goes to defending their now bogus claims instead of doing real journalism & investigation.
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If one's goal is journalism, then they are wrong.
If one's goal is page-views, and creating a controversy (right or wrong) gets page-views, then they are right.
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Thanks for the great fact-checking.
The story of BBN and its role in the foundations of the Internet--so well told in "When Wizards Stay Up Late," as you noted in your article here--is fascinating in and of itself.
I applaud your work in setting the record straight. Please continue.
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Re: Mythology isn't just for HuffPo
It has become an Internet meme to continue the mockery of Gore, mainly by a minority of smart-aleck newtechs who are not aware of any history earlier than their graduation from grammar school.
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American Express/IBM
The issue at hand was that American Express used an outsourcing firm to review if a product was a good fit (read: common sense) every so often. Echomail noted in a phone call that they would be using some integration with IBM Lotus Notes Domino. From what I can gather (speculation), Echomail then lost the bid to continue working with American Express as a vendor.
Echomail then assumed that American Express went to IBM to get the features they desired, and sued both companies.
I've not had a chance to read through all the filings, but this is my best guess. I'd recommend that someone more law competent review the filings to make sure my assumptions are accurate.
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For those who are confused
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Re: Re: Re: It was simply time.
It seems to me that he is already claiming to have invented it. And as long as he claims to have forgotten about prior knowledge of it, you'd agree with him. Wow.
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Re: American Express/IBM
For example, the Elm email client was released in 1986, and one of the cool things about it was the "filter" program, which allowed one to write rulesets that did pattern-matching against incoming mail and then execute various actions. Elm was quite popular in the late 80's (as its interactive interface was easier to use than that of traditional unix mail or the BSD version of Mail) and it spawned various offshots, notably pine and mutt, both of which still see a lot of use today.
Anyway, my point is that a lot of novel features mentioned in the EchoMail Wikipedia entry aren't. Which begs the question: who wrote and edited that entry?
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Re: For those who are confused
He wrote his next book (The Forgotten Kid Genius who invented Time-Travel) in 1962, it's been available in the Alternative Universe that he created before breakfast one sunny day in 1686 (predating Newton's Principia by a whole year - this kid is THAT GOOD!!).
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and perfected it perfectly. first time?
I know of companies that still use interoffice communications, and still implement it wrong. And a 14 year old kid did it right?
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Re: Große Lüge
I think i will talk about my favorite project - the fMail. more advanced than email, but not as spying as gmail.
fmail will revolutionize the world by removing advertising from gmail, while giving you 88 features!
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Re: Thanks for the great fact-checking.
I've never been a HuffPo reader, so I don't really know their track record and had no opinion of them. Pretty much my entire experience with them is reading these email articles. Based on those, there's no need to compare them with reputable journalistic organizations. They're a laughingstock all on their own.
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You know who to blame for that don't you?
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Re: Re: Mythology isn't just for HuffPo
So your point is what, exactly?
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I can't say I blame him.
You'd have to be pretty damn rich and stupid to get people to look the other way on a case like this.
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Now, that said, I also get to point out that there is a contradictory message in all of this, which is that Techdirt is often a proponent of "citizen jouralists and bloggers"m saying that the old media is pretty much lost compared to the new ways of getting news. Yet here we have a perfect example of what happens when there are apparently no real barriers to material getting posted on a site.
It seems more like a situation where the public's trust has been misplaced, but it's hard to get them to see it. You have to wonder how many people have read this story and said "wow, he really did invent mail!". You have to wonder how many other stories on the HuffPo site are similarly less than complete. You have to wonder what the world looks like in the future if this is our source of news and information.
That is the bigger story, the one being ignored.
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How many people do you think will read at least two different blog posts from two opposing sources on this story, compared to the number of people who would have picked up two different daily newspapers?
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Here's a good example of how HuffPo is blowing it:
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/09/huffington-post-hires-truther-to-cover-national-secur ity-194868.html
In other words, they are quickly sinking to the level of and perhaps well below the low water mark standards set by Faux News. It's as if they are all trying to compete with The Onion and Upworthy.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Mythology isn't just for HuffPo
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number of paid shills and PR men at H.P. ?
One such example was Joseph K. Grieboski, a blogger who abruptly stopped blogging in 2011 when he was exposed as a paid shill masquerading as a "religious tolerance" advocate.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-k-grieboski/
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The problem online is that while we have plenty of choices, many of those choices are presented to us from sites we already like. People who visit Torrent Freak (example) are very likely to visit Techdirt. People who visit the Drudge Report are more likely to watch or visit Fox News. What get isn't two sides of a story, but rather the group reinforcement of the story you already like. When these sources do reveal the other side to you, it's almost always done in a way that discredits that source and tries to make them look bad.
The internet as a result becomes that big echo chamber, which is why it's so hard to kill off bad information.
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Re: HUFFINGTON POST
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I'm sure that'll work just as well as that time when I was a kid and mobile phones weren't an option, so I used a banana instead.
Actually, probably not. I at least got to eat the banana.
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Re: an invention becomes inevitable given the state of the art
This is why we constantly see multiple independent re-inventions of the same thing - news of the earlier "invention" takes time to trickle out to the wider community (esp. young people who aren't well connected).
So, those who haven't heard about it re-invent it themselves.
Such multiple independent "inventions" ought to be the definition of "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art", thus making any patent on such inventions invalid.
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I couldn't agree more. It just seems obvious to me. Fortunately, software patents weren't allowed when EMAIL was written. If they had been, there'd be no internet today, let alone email as we know it.
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Nuh Uh
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Re: Nuh Uh
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Fact #2: Ray Tomlinson invented email and sent the first email.
Fact #3: The '@' symbol equals the invention of email.
Fact #4: RFCs demonstrate email existed prior to 1978.
Fact #5: CTSS, developed in 1960s, is email.
After all, just because email wasn't called 'email' doesn't mean it didn't exist. To say otherwise is to claim that an American invented closets just because they were called different names in other countries.
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Fact #2: Ray Tomlinson invented email and sent the first email.
Fact #3: The '@' symbol equals an important step in the invention of email.
Fact #4: RFCs demonstrate email existed prior to 1978.
Fact #5: CTSS, developed in the 1960s, is email.
After all, just because email wasn't called 'email', doesn't mean it didn't exist. To say otherwise is to claim that an American invented closets just because they were called different names in other countries.
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Huffington Post Retraction!
Editor's Note
The post that previously appeared in this space -- part of a blogger-generated series on the history of email -- is no longer available. Readers and media commentators alerted us to factual and sourcing issues in the series and, after an internal review, we removed it from the site.
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Re: Huffington Post Retraction!
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