Sep 05 2014 : The Economic Times (Delhi)
Email `Inventor' Ayyadurai to Seek Public Support
Jayadevan PK & Varun Sood
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Bangalore
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Shiva Ayyadurai, the man in the middle of a rag ing controversy over his claims of being the inventor of email, doesn't want to go legal on his detractors but is looking for support from the public.“Lawsuits take a long time. If I have to pull the trigger I will.
But I have decided to go direct ly to the people,“ Ayyadurai said in an interview with ET.“When Deepak Chopra started talking of ayurveda in the US,he was attacked. His advice was to go directly to the people,“ he said.
Ayyadurai,an American of Indian origin who in sists that he is in fact the inventor of email, is once again right in the middle of a global controversy--not surprising given the grandiose nature of the claim. Did he, or did he not, invent electronic mail?
After hearing his talk at an event hosted by spiritual guru Deepak Cho pra, Huffington Post founder Arian na Huffington decided to commission a series of articles on the history of email, Ayyadurai, 50, said.
The controversy is one of those sto ries on the Internet that refuse to die, in spite of having been written about and argued over many times. Some experts including Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, dismiss Ayyadurai's claims and say that email was developed by the Defence Advanced Research Pro jects Agency (Darpa) in the 1960s. (That US organization played a critical role in the birth of the Internet.) Ayyadurai says email was born in a city in New Jersey not exactly known for technological breakthroughs.
“In 1978, there was a 14-year-old boy working in Newark. He did in fact cre ate 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,“ said Ayyadurai, referring to his younger self.
Credit for the invention has been appropriated by defence contractor Raytheon, which built a brand for itself based on the claim, he said. Raytheon declined to comment.
The controversy captured the public imagination first in 2012, when the Smithsonian Museum acquired some documents from Ayyadurai, following which articles calling him the inventor of email surfaced. His claims were promptly refuted by critics.
Computer historian Thomas Haigh was quick to point out in 2012: “Electronic mail, or email, was introduced at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1965 and was widely discussed in the press during the 1970s. Tens of thousands of users were swapping messages daily by 1980.“ His critics have said that in 1982, Ayyadurai merely copyrighted the term `email' and the code he wrote and that such messaging existed long before 1978. However, he says that it was the only way to protect software as patents didn't cover software in those days.
According to him, critics find it hard to believe that a 14-year-old Indian in a backwater like Newark could invent something as massive and socially significant as email.
“Fundamentally there is a narrative around where innovation can come out from... the innovators' spirit of America still exists. However, there is a narrative in America which goes like--you must go to MIT to get your calling card.Or you go to Harvard and then you drop out and then you've made it,“ he said.
Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa said there was no basis for such an argument. “There is no such discrimination between East Coast and West Coast. After all, Bell Labs--which was long the center of innovation--was from New Jersey . Also, IBM, DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.), and Unisys were East Coast companies and were big players around the time he made his claims. In those days, the East Coast was the centre of innovation--not West Coast.“
The Mumbai-born Ayyadurai has come a long way from New Jersey , having himself gone to MIT and obtained a PhD in biological engineering from the premier school. His personal website bears the motto `Know the truth, be the light, find your way' and bears a picture of him posing with Prime Minister Narendra Modi along his book, The Email Revolution.
Ayyadurai, who moved with his family to the US when he was seven, is currently running a new company that he believes will be bigger than email.He's raised $1.5 million for Cytosolve, which aims to build a new way to model molecular reactions of a human cell on a computer, he said.
“Now we can model molecular reactions on the computer to revolutionise the entire process of multi-combination therapeutics,“ said Ayyadurai. “Cytosolve is a big innovation and is going to be the next billion dollar company,“ he said.
But I have decided to go direct ly to the people,“ Ayyadurai said in an interview with ET.“When Deepak Chopra started talking of ayurveda in the US,he was attacked. His advice was to go directly to the people,“ he said.
Ayyadurai,an American of Indian origin who in sists that he is in fact the inventor of email, is once again right in the middle of a global controversy--not surprising given the grandiose nature of the claim. Did he, or did he not, invent electronic mail?
After hearing his talk at an event hosted by spiritual guru Deepak Cho pra, Huffington Post founder Arian na Huffington decided to commission a series of articles on the history of email, Ayyadurai, 50, said.
The controversy is one of those sto ries on the Internet that refuse to die, in spite of having been written about and argued over many times. Some experts including Sabeer Bhatia, co-founder of Hotmail, dismiss Ayyadurai's claims and say that email was developed by the Defence Advanced Research Pro jects Agency (Darpa) in the 1960s. (That US organization played a critical role in the birth of the Internet.) Ayyadurai says email was born in a city in New Jersey not exactly known for technological breakthroughs.
“In 1978, there was a 14-year-old boy working in Newark. He did in fact cre ate 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,“ said Ayyadurai, referring to his younger self.
Credit for the invention has been appropriated by defence contractor Raytheon, which built a brand for itself based on the claim, he said. Raytheon declined to comment.
The controversy captured the public imagination first in 2012, when the Smithsonian Museum acquired some documents from Ayyadurai, following which articles calling him the inventor of email surfaced. His claims were promptly refuted by critics.
Computer historian Thomas Haigh was quick to point out in 2012: “Electronic mail, or email, was introduced at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in 1965 and was widely discussed in the press during the 1970s. Tens of thousands of users were swapping messages daily by 1980.“ His critics have said that in 1982, Ayyadurai merely copyrighted the term `email' and the code he wrote and that such messaging existed long before 1978. However, he says that it was the only way to protect software as patents didn't cover software in those days.
According to him, critics find it hard to believe that a 14-year-old Indian in a backwater like Newark could invent something as massive and socially significant as email.
“Fundamentally there is a narrative around where innovation can come out from... the innovators' spirit of America still exists. However, there is a narrative in America which goes like--you must go to MIT to get your calling card.Or you go to Harvard and then you drop out and then you've made it,“ he said.
Entrepreneur-turned-academic Vivek Wadhwa said there was no basis for such an argument. “There is no such discrimination between East Coast and West Coast. After all, Bell Labs--which was long the center of innovation--was from New Jersey . Also, IBM, DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.), and Unisys were East Coast companies and were big players around the time he made his claims. In those days, the East Coast was the centre of innovation--not West Coast.“
The Mumbai-born Ayyadurai has come a long way from New Jersey , having himself gone to MIT and obtained a PhD in biological engineering from the premier school. His personal website bears the motto `Know the truth, be the light, find your way' and bears a picture of him posing with Prime Minister Narendra Modi along his book, The Email Revolution.
Ayyadurai, who moved with his family to the US when he was seven, is currently running a new company that he believes will be bigger than email.He's raised $1.5 million for Cytosolve, which aims to build a new way to model molecular reactions of a human cell on a computer, he said.
“Now we can model molecular reactions on the computer to revolutionise the entire process of multi-combination therapeutics,“ said Ayyadurai. “Cytosolve is a big innovation and is going to be the next billion dollar company,“ he said.
