Who invented email? A 14 year old Indian!

Email turned 32 year old recently (15th July 2015).

We are all making use of emails. It has great importance in modern business communication. Every day, hundreds of thousands of emails are sent from service providers to customers and suppliers, vendors and email marketers and employees. It is not only for business but and are even used for personal communications. But, do you know, who invented email? Little known and shy 14 year old Indian invented it! Yes, he was 14 that time.

Who is Dr. V A Shiva Ayyadurai?

He is an Indian-American scientist invented Email when he was just 14 year old. Currently he is an MIT systems scientist, technologist, entrepreneur and educator, who holds four degrees from MIT, is a Fulbright Scholar, Lemelson-MIT Awards Finalist and Westinghouse Science Talent Honors Award recipient.

Shiva - the inventor of Email, grew up in Newark, after moving from Mumbai, India to US at the age of seven. While studying at Livingston High School in New Jersey, he started working on the electronic messaging system for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

Finally succeeding on 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai developed a computer program, which replicated the features of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. He named his program “EMAIL”. With 50,000 lines of code, it was a unique system developed for the first time.

Shiva filed an application for copyright in his program and in 1982 the United States Copyright Office issued a Certificate of Registration, No. TXu-111-775, to him on the program. At that time copyright was the only way to protect software inventions.

He writes about his journey towards inventing world’s first Email program used to send messages between the machines. You can refer to his entire bio here- http://vashiva.com/

Controversy related to invention of Email

As rightly pointed out by slimvus.com, “In spite of this discovery, recognition still eludes Ayyadurai. Lost in the pages of history, he is a name not many of us know. Let’s thank the ‘Father of Email’ and honour him for giving us an outstanding invention that changed the way we communicate and also paved way for chats and instant messaging.”

Read complete article here - http://www.slimluvs.com/meet-the-14-year-old-indian-who-invented-email-32years-ago-the-boy-the-internet-forgot/

Writing for Gizmodo, Sam Biddle argued that email was developed a decade before EMAIL, beginning with Ray Tomlinson's sending the first text letter between two computers in 1971. Biddle allowed for the possibility that Ayyadurai may have coined the term "EMAIL" and used the header terms without being aware of earlier work, but maintained that the historical record isn't definitive on either point. 

Responding to his critics on his personal website, Ayyadurai described his program EMAIL as "the first of its kind -- a fully integrated, database-driven, electronic translation of the interoffice paper mail system derived from the ordinary office situation. It provided the electronic equivalents and features of mail receipt and transmission including: the inbox, outbox, drafts, address book, carbon copies, registered mail, ability to forward, broadcast along with a host of other features that users take for granted in Web-based email programs such as Gmail and Hotmail. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first to design, implement, test and deploy these features in an everyday office situation. This was and is email as we know it today."

Let me know your thoughts on this.