Email is the Electronic Interoffice, Inter-organizational Paper-based Mail System

In 1978, the challenge put to Shiva was to create an electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system. He met this challenge, by conceiving and developing an electronic system that replicated the interlocking parts of UMDNJ's entire paper mail system. He called the system “EMAIL”, which incorporated and integrated the parts of the paper mail system as shown in Table 2

Amujjale:






There was never a system that had all the features explained above that which constitutes the 'electronic mail' and or EMAIL prior to the one DR Shiva invented.

Dr Shiva is the inventor of EMAIL.

And yes i agree with the consequences of the wager.

Do you mean he invented email or he invented the specific program called EMAIL?

LordReed:


Do you mean he invented email or he invented the specific program called EMAIL?

He invented the specific program called EMAIL.


Quoting Noam Chomsky:

"Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system.:

Before Dr Shiva's EMAIL program, no such interlocked electronic mail system existed.

The elements of email which Shiva invented functioned together to provide the foundation of complex interoffice, inter-departmental, inter-organisational communications.

Most experts thought it imposible to invent at the time and there were no efforts made to does so.

Prior to 1978, the term 'email' did not exist in modern English language, as verified by the Oxford English Dictionary and Marriam Webster.

Email was precisely defined in 1978 when Dr Shiva created the term EMAIL" to name his computer program.

Sending a text message isnt EMAIL.

The @ symbol doesnt equate to email.

An electronic message from point A to point B isnt an electronic mail system.

Dr Shiva at the age of 14 years old invented the first electronic mail system based on converting the existing physical Interoffice, inter-organizational paper mail system.

It was the entire 'system' as presented bellow:-


The Features of EMAIL, the First Email System

Electronic Interoffice, Inter-oganizational Mail System.

Interoffice Mail System Parts
EMAIL Parts
Inbox
Outbox
Drafts
Memo
To
From
Subject - (70 chars width)
Date
Body
Cc
Bcc
Attachments
Folders
Compose
Forward (orRedistribution)
Reply
Address Book
Groups
Return Receipt
Sorting
Send
Receive
Scanning Mail
Forwarding with RETURN RECEIPT (or registered memo)
Editing
Broadcast Memo
Sending Memo to Group
Deleting
Purging
Updating Address Book
Searching Address Group
By Group
By User Name (short name)
By Last Name
By Zipnode (node or location)

[Continued on next post]

Why did you go ahead to share all posts and why are some posts deleted?

fieryy:
Why did you go ahead to share all posts and why are some posts deleted?

Someone keeps deleting my posts.

pronubian:



Someone keeps deleting my posts.

Not sure about it being a 'someone' though. Anti spam bot bans me when I type in German. It always bans you when it doesn't recognizes what you typed.

fieryy:


Not sure about it being a 'someone' though. Anti spam bot bans me when I type in German. It always bans you when it doesn't recognizes what you typed.

The evidence that shows the irrefutable proof is a summation that reads over 750,000 words.

Anti spam bot isn’t allowing me to post.

pronubian:



The evidence that shows the irrefutable proof is a summation that reads over 750,000 words.

Anti spam bot isn’t allowing me to post.

Sorry. Maybe try it with another account. That's if you have one

Table 2(see image below)

The Features of EMAIL, the First Email System
Electronic Interoffice, Inter-organizational Mail System

Continued on next post

See below for the completion of Table 2

The creation of EMAIL, with all the familiar features (Table 2) which we take for granted today in programs such as Gmail, Hotmail and others, as defined by the 14 year old V A Shiva Ayyadurai back in 1978 --- the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational mail system.

Definition of Email prior to 2012

Email is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system.

Email is not simply the exchange of text messages.

Email is really a system --- a system of interlocking parts, each of which is essential for ordinary people to communicate effectively with one or many others, in an environment where different kinds of information must be shared (memos, documents, files, etc.) i.e. the modern office environment.

It's important to note that the World Wide Web didn't exist at the time of Shiva's invention.

Example of Artifacts Submitted to Smithsonian (Feb 2012)

Learning Programming @ NYU, 1978

False Claims About Email



Sending text messages electronically 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 communication systems. While the technology pioneers who created these systems should be heralded for their efforts, and given credit for their specific accomplishments and contributions, these early computer programs were clearly not email.


Standard histories of the Internet are full of claims that certain individuals (and teams) in the ARPAnet environment in the 1970s and 1980s “invented email.” These claims have been compiled in the list below. For example, the “@” sign, early programs for sending and receiving messages, and technical specifications known as RFCs, have been claimed to be “email.” But as some claimants have admitted, none of these innovations were intended as a system of interlocking parts Inbox, Memo, Outbox, Folders, Address Book, etc. the email system used today by more than 500 million people worldwide.

False Claim #1: “Email” was created on the ARPAnet



Fact #1: Email was created at UMDNJ, not on the ARPAnet



This quote, “Under ARPAnet several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network,” [1] is a misuse of the term “email.” The invention referenced here is command-line protocols for transferring text messages, not email as defined to be a system of interlocking parts, such as the 1978 EMAIL platform, a full-scale emulation of the interoffice inter-organizational paper mail system. As the related references show, early workers in the field of electronic messaging had no intention to create a full-scale electronic version of interoffice or inter-organizational paper mail system (ref. 1.1, 1.2), and in fact were not even allowed to work on creating an electronic system to replicate “letters”, e.g the interoffice memo (ref. 1.3).

II. False Claim #2: Ray Tomlinson invented "email"


Fact #2: Ray Tomlinson “did not invent email”,
he modified SNDMSG for exchanging text messages across computers


This quote, “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.” [2] misuses the term “email.” The invention referenced is a program called SNDMSG, which was a set of highly technical computer codes that a sender had to type to transfer a message from one computer to another. Tomlinson updated an existing SNDMSG command program to transmit text strings over a network connection. SNDMSG was not a system of interlocking parts designed for laypersons to transmit routine office communications, i.e. it was not designed to replicate the interoffice paper mail system. As related references show that SNDMSG was not only not email but also just a very rudimentary form of text messaging.

What is more alarming is Padlipsky's reference in the standard “histories” has been removed. Padlipsky was one among Mr. Tomlinson's peers. He himself was present in the 1970's when “email” was notdeveloped by Tomlinson.


https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/ray-tomlinsons-story-about-inventing-email-is-the-biggest-propaganda-lie-of-modern-tech-history-shiva-ayyadurai/articleshow/51337493.cms

False Claim #3: The “@” symbol equals the invention of “email”

Fact #3: The “@” symbol separates the user name from the domain name


This quote, “When [Tomlinson] is remembered at all, it is as the man who picked @ as the locator symbol in electronic addresses. In truth though, he is the inventor of e-mail, the application that launched the digital information revolution. And yet the breakthrough he made was such a simple evolutionary step that hardly anyone noticed it till later.” [3] is a misuse of the term “email”. The invention referenced is the use of the “@” symbol to distinguish two computers when sending a text message. The “@” symbol is not a necessary component of the system of interlocking parts, in some cases “-at” was used, or the “.” symbol as in the EMAIL system.

Some have mistakenly characterized the @ symbol as “underused”. As a point of fact, the @ symbol was the line kill character on Multics, another early timesharing system, and created a character conflict for those Multics users trying to use Tomlinson's SNDMSG. As Pogran noted, “Do folks remember that @ was the Multics line-kill character? We were opposed to Ray Tomlinson's famous (or is it infamous?) selection of @ as the character that separated the user name from the host name in email addresses. Early versions of ARPANET email specs allowed the use of space-a-t-space (i.e., “ at ”) in place of the @ to accommodate Multics (and the mail composition software I wrote used the syntax -at on the command line)” [4]

The @ symbol was “underused” only to the extent that it interfered with some users' host environments.

False Claim #4: RFCs demonstrate “email” existed prior to 1978

Fact #4: RFC's were simply written documentation,
neither an email computer program nor an email system

This quote, “…email underpinnings were further cemented in 1977's RFC 733, a foundational document of what became the Internet itself.” [5] is a misuse of the term “email” because the RFCs (Request for Comments) and RFC 733 were written documentation not a computer program or code or a system. Moreover, this quote and others such as “In 1977 these features and others went from best practices to a binding standard in RFC 733.” are hyperboles. RFC 733 was drafted in November 1977 and was an attempt at standardization of messaging protocols and interfaces; it should not be conflated as “email underpinnings” with the electronic system of interlocked parts defining the interoffice paper mail system. The RFCs by their own admission [ref. 4.1] did not even dictate which features of the interoffice mail process would be included such as the basic components of user interfaces for message creation and reading.


RFC 733 was an attempted standard that was never fully accepted [ref. 4.3]. The very term ‘RFC’ means “Request for Comments” [ref. 4.2]. It was merely a document and only proposed an interface for message format and transmission, but said little about feature sets of individual electronic messaging or mail systems. As the opening of RFC 733 states:

This specification is intended strictly as a definition of what is to be passed between hosts on the ARPANET. It is NOT intended to dictate either features which systems on the Network are expected to support, or user interfaces to message creating or reading programs. [6]

The RFCs’ authors, by their own admission, clearly state this was not their intention. RFCs were the command-line terminology at best, but not email.

False Claim #5: Programs for exchanging messages were “email”

Fact #5: These programs were not email, the full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system

This quote “By the mid-1970s, other user-oriented e-mail programs arrived on the scene. Two of the more popular examples were ‘Hermes’ at Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, now BBN – a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon — and ‘Laurel’ which was in use at Xerox PARC,” [7] is a misuse of the term “email” since programs like Hermes and Laurel were not a system of interlocking parts for emulating the interoffice paper mail system. Laurel was really only one component, a front-end for the independent, lower-level Grapevine messaging platform [ref. 5.1]. Though Laurel was beginning to incorporate some elements of the interlocked parts such as folders and the inbox, it was still like nearly all messaging systems of the period, heavily dependent on external system resources, and not designed as a system of interlocking parts. Furthermore, internal Xerox documentation [ref. 5.1, p. 7] shows that independent Grapevine component was still being prototyped with five dedicated servers in 1981, well after Ayyadurai’s EMAIL system had been in use routine communications at UMDNJ for several years. No word of Laurel or Grapevine would be publicly available until 1982 [8], when the Xerox work would be published in the Communications of the ACM [ref. 5.1, 5.2].

Hermes was similar. It was not a system of interlocked parts and not something user-friendly that an ordinary office worker could use. Users had to learn about 20 commands to use it [ref. 5.3].

Another program PLATO, which was an invention for computer-assisted instruction which some reference as “email”, is one that Vallee’s comments also help to place in context relative to Ayyadurai’s EMAIL system [ref. 5.4].

In 1979, all known messaging systems were itemized in RFC 808 by the leading researchers who worked at the big universities, large companies and for the military [ref. 5.5]. Note, Laurel and PLATO do not appear on this list.

For a review of individual systems of the period, it is best to look at the 1979 RFC 808, which contains a “listing the names of all the [computer mail] systems anybody had ever heard of.” [9] The vast majority of the systems such as – MSG, MS, SNDMSG, RD, HERMES along them – all share a common ancestry, and inherit features (and deficiencies) from this heritage. John Vittal tried to distinguish the features and qualities of his MSG message system relative to its antecedents : [10]

False Claim #6: MAIL on CTSS developed in 1960's was “email”

Fact #6: CTSS' MAIL was an early text messaging system, not email

This quote "Electronic mail, or email, was introduced at MIT in 1965 and was widely discussed in the press during the 1970s. Tens of thousands of users were swapping messages by 1980." referring to the MAIL command on MIT’s CTSS timesharing system is a misuse of the term “email”. The basic usage of MAIL, as documented in CTSS Programming Staff Note #39 [11], is below:

False Claim #7: In 2012, the term “email” “now” needs to be defined

Fact #7: Email was defined precisely in 1978 as the electronic version of the interrogative mail system

Following news of Ayyadurai's invention of email, industry insiders have attempted to redefine the term “email”. For example these individuals have openly asserted:
“…we need a more specific definition that captures the essence of computer based electronic mail as it actually emerged. Here is one that was developed in discussion with email pioneers Ray Tomlinson, Tom Van Vleck and Dave Crocker:

‘Electronic mail is a service provided by computer programs to send unstructured textual messages of about the same length as paper letters from the account of one user to recipients' personal electronic mailboxes, where they are stored for later retrieval.’”
[ref. 7.1]

Email was clearly defined in 1978 as the electronic interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, and formally in 1982 by Ayyadurai's US Copyright. Such a revisionist definition by industry insiders, now in 2012, serves one purpose, to allow them, e.g. Tomlinson, Van Vleck and Crocker – who worked with the early messaging systems SNDMSG, MAIL and MS respectively, to now retroactively choose a definition for electronic mail that ensures their primacy to “email”, which they did not create and had no intention of creating

The facts are the literature of the period reveals that the term "email" did not exist prior to 1978 and the definition of "electronic mail", and a specification of its functions, was anything but clear-cut. It was Ayyadurai's work starting in 1978 and the formal copyright of 1982 which clearly defined "email" and "electronic mail" as a system of interlocked parts emulating the entire interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system in an electronic format. Prior to Ayyadurai's invention, there was confusion even about the term “electronic mail”.

False Claim #8: EMAIL is not an invention, but VisiCalc is an invention

Fact #8: Like VisiCalc, EMAIL also created an electronic metaphor --- a metaphor for the interoffice paper mail system

Some “historians” in collusion with industry insiders who seek to discredit Ayyadurai's invention of email, have gone to the extent of asserting that EMAIL is not an invention, but VisiCalc is.

If they refer to “email” as a text message, then email is not an invention. However, in recognizing that EMAIL, the first email system, by Ayyadurai is the electronic version of the interoffice paper mail system, then EMAIL, like VisiCalc, is an invention.

There is a clear analogy between invention of EMAIL and the invention of VisiCalc. Bricklin’s title as the Father of the Modern Spreadsheet [19] belies significant contributions to the field of data processing had been done prior to the release of VisiCalc. It was the subject of Iveron and Brooks’s seminal Automatic Data Processing [20] and a major research topic for industry and academia. What Bricklin did was to create an integrated system for data processing – complete with a consistent UI and strong metaphor – targeted towards end users. Bricklin’s accomplishment wasn’t that he invented data processing, but that he made it integrated and accessible.

In the same way that Bricklin’s VisiCalc electronified the system of paper spreadsheets, Ayyadurai’s EMAIL electronified the system of interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system. Both took well-defined social processes, and gave them the power of computation, freeing users from the drudgery of manual recalculation in the former case, or the delivery of physical interoffice memos in the latter.

This puts both projects in stark contrast to the messaging systems of early timesharing architectures, which evolved to address the administrative and technical needs of mainframe users. As stated in RFC 808, most of these message systems “were not formal projects (in the sense of explicitly sponsored research), but things that ‘just happened’”, and Jacques Vallee wrote [21] of these early systems:

False Claim #9: DEC and Wang created “email"

Fact #9: Email systems were not available from DEC and Wang in 1980

By 1980, electronic mail systems aimed at the office environments were not "readily available from companies such as DEC, Wang, and IBM".

Such statements are conflating the term “email” with all forms of electronic communication – from telegraph services, to Telex or CBMS systems.

This conflation is confusing, and a misuse of the term "email".

The offerings of electronic mail systems by private suppliers varied greatly, and were largely incompatible. Wang Laboratories, for example, had already been well established for its line of word processing equipment [21]. When network facilities became readily available, it bolted on file transfer facilities to its machines, creating a line of “communicating word processors” [22]. This networking of word processors is not "email".

In 1980, there was tremendous pressure to innovate in the “office automation sector”. However, as addressed in James Robinson’s 1984 thesis, An Overview of Electronic Mail Systems [23], these offerings were part of a larger defensive strategy:

False Claim #10: LAUREL was “email"

Fact#10: LAUREL was not email, but a front-end to text messaging programs

The quote "...the PARC email software, Laurel, ran on the user’s local computer, was operated with a mouse, and pulled messages from the PARC server to a personal hard drive for storage and filing." is a misuse of the term "email". The invention Laurel was a mail user interface program for the Xerox Alto. It was a graphical front-end to a series of messaging programs akin to SNDMSG and MS [24]. The use of mouse was an innovation of its host environment Alto, not of Laurel itself [25]. Laurel was capable of basic message composition, scanning and flat-file storage (through the use of its *.mail files). Like other file-flat approaches, mail management remained in the hands of users [26].

The Laurel Manual, as it existed at Stanford in September 1980 [27], provides thorough explanation of what Laurel was, and what it was capable of. Laurel was just a user interface, and not the system of interlocked parts to emulate the entire interoffice paper mail system.

Laurel was disconnected and relied on `"Piping" other small programs which were loosely connected to each other.

False Claim #11: The term “email” belongs to CompuServe

Fact #11: The term "email" was coined in 1978 at UMDNJ

The term email was first coined by VA Shiva Ayyadurai in 1978. Those five characters "E", "M", "A", "I", and "L" were juxtaposed together to name the main subroutine of the first email system. Ayyadurai coined the term email for the idiosyncratic reason that in 1978 FORTRAN IV only allowed for a six-character maximum variable and subroutine naming convention, and the RTE-IV operating system had a five-character limit for program names.

By 1980, Ayyadurai’s EMAIL was in production use at UMDNJ. Needless to say, EMAIL – the program – and its user manual were already in distribution around the UMDNJ campus. CompuServe has no clear claim to primacy here: a US Trademark database search shows the first use in commerce as April, 1981. CompuServe applied for an EMAIL trademark on June 27, 1983 – an effort that it abandoned in August 1984.

Email was a CompuServe trademark in 1983 - but that remains a moot point for discussions of primacy. However, for the sake of clarity and transparency, two instances of CompuServe’s 1983 EMAIL advertising are included below: