The History of Email

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The History of Email

Postby pcslim » Tue Sep 02, 2014 4:45 pm

The History of Email :smack:
The Huffington Post is attempting to rewrite the history of email. Even though email was in use for over a decade before the supposed inventor supposedly invented it, the Huff Post claims otherwise. (I recall first using email while in grad school back in the mid to early 1970s. Yes, we called it email and essentially it was the same then as it is now.) The truth is that the guy in the article just wrote a program that he named EMAIL, but the term email was in use long before he wrote his little program, which, BTW, contained nothing original. It was impressive that a kid his age (14 at the time) was able to basically code such a complex program, but there was nothing truly original about the software he wrote.
Why Is Huffington Post Running A Multi-Part Series To Promote The Lies Of A Guy Who Pretended To Invent Email?
There was a messaging system called MAILBOX at MIT in 1965. You can read all the details of it here, including source code. Ray Tomlinson is frequently credited with inventing the modern concept of email for the internet by establishing the @ symbol (in 1972) as a way of determining both the user and which computer to send the email to. By 1975, there were things like email folders (invented by Larry Roberts) and some other basic email apps. As is noted, by 1976 -- two years before Ayyadurai wrote his app -- email was 75% of all ARPANET traffic.

As noted in a comment left to the TechDirt article:
Actually, he didn't invent cc, bcc, etc either:

optional-field =
"To" ":" #address
/ "cc" ":" #address
/ "bcc" ":" #address ; Blind carbon
/ "Subject" ":" *text
/ "Comments" ":" *text
/ "Message-ID" ":" mach-id ; Only one allowed
/ "In-Reply-To"":" #(phrase / mach-id)
/ "References" ":" #(phrase / mach-id)
/ "Keywords" ":" #phrase
/ extension-field ; To be defined in
; supplemental
; specifications
/ user-defined-field ; Must have unique
; field-name & may
; be pre-empted


RFC: 733 dated 21 November 1977

Even bcc and cc weren't original ideas as they were in use before the program named EMAIL was released. An RFC is a set of standards developed by computer scientists/engineers, most often reflecting practices that have developed over months and years.
LINK: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140901/07280928386/huffpo-publishes-bizarre-misleading-factually-incorrect-multi-part-series-pretending-guy-invented-email-even-though-he-didnt.shtml
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Re: The History of Email

Postby pcslim » Tue Sep 02, 2014 4:56 pm

The history of email
The program that the Huff Post guy wrote would have been of moderate complexity. Somewhat impressive for a fourteen-year-old, but nothing beyond what many bright kids are capable of given the right opportunities and resources. At any rate, I think it is important to tell the story correctly and give credit where credit is due. To do otherwise is to spread misinformation and heaven and hell both know that we have more than enough misinformation being spread around this planet at this time!
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. He picked the @ symbol from the computer keyboard to denote sending messages from one computer to another. So then, for anyone using Internet standards, it was simply a matter of nominating name-of-the-user@name-of-the-computer. Internet pioneer Jon Postel, who we will hear more of later, was one of the first users of the new system, and is credited with describing it as a "nice hack". It certainly was, and it has lasted to this day.

LINK: http://www.nethistory.info/History%20of%20the%20Internet/email.html
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Re: The History of Email

Postby a2z » Tue Sep 02, 2014 8:07 pm

Raymond Tomlinson - the inventor of email
Here's the guy who can most accurately be considered to be the inventer of email. In reality email emerged as the result of the efforts of lots of computer scientists and engineers. The guy who The Huff Post is talking about contributed absolutely nothing to the development of email. He implemented a simple program that did nothing that other programs written years earlier didn't already do.
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Re: The History of Email

Postby cactuspete » Wed Sep 03, 2014 7:21 am

How is it possible for journalists to fail so badly? You'd think that they could do a little research and discover the basic facts for themselves. It wouldn't have taken much effort! I started working for the military back in the 1970s and I recall using email back then, which we alternately referred to as electronic mail or email or sometimes emessages. The Huffington Post may not have a great reputation for getting the story right, but this is simply ridiculous!
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Re: The History of Email

Postby desertrat » Wed Sep 03, 2014 8:14 am

Laughable! I guess the idea was that it was an inspirational story that would make a lot of people feel good and so even though it's an outright lie, they decided to put it together as a five part story just the same. I recall doodling with code back in the 1970s and systems back then were much simpler than they are now. Many 14-year-olds would have been able to put together a program like that at that time, but very few had access at that point. In fact, it was pretty rare for even most of us engineers to have spare time to doodle with software at that point.
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Re: The History of Email

Postby pcslim » Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:01 pm

Huffington Post Doubles Down, Has MIT Professor Spread Blatant Falsehoods About Creation Of Email
Rather than admitting their mistake, they're trying to redefine what it was exactly that they meant. They should just come clean and admit that the guy in no way invented or even contributed to the development of email. He simply implemented his own version of a program that was already in existence. Ultimately the Huffington Post is famous for BS stories and this is just another one...
:smack:
What's bizarre is that the Huffington Post is a willing accomplice in perpetuating this myth -- and why the company won't comment on this, and the nature of its relationship with Weber and Ayyadurai. Again, either the Huffington Post is running a sponsored series without disclosing it (in violation of FTC rules) or it has been totally duped.

LINK: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140903/05352128399/huffington-post-doubles-down-has-mit-professor-spread-blatant-falsehoods-about-creation-email.shtml
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Re: The History of Email

Postby pcslim » Wed Sep 03, 2014 4:05 pm

Did V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai Invent Email? A Computer Historian Responds
This page contains a lot of good information and fleshes out Ayyadurai's attempts to claim for himself credit for something accomplished by someone else. I've heard of email scams, but this is a scam involving email that's definitely different from all the others!
To “invent” something you have to devise some kind of new technology or capability that had not existed before. A computer program is not invented; it is “written” or “developed.” So, for example, it would make sense to say that Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston invented the spreadsheet when they wrote Visicalc. It wouldn’t make sense to say that Google invented the web browser when it developed Google Chrome, as many previous browsers existed, or even that it “invented the world’s first Google Chrome” as that is a specific system rather than a technology.

LINK: http://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai
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Re: The History of Email

Postby cactuspete » Thu Sep 04, 2014 7:18 am

It appears to me that this Ayyadurai guy is just trying to get a lot of publicity and that he figures that the controversey caused by his false claims will help him promote his book, website, lecture tour, or whatever other BS he's attempting to peddle. One way or the other this is all just a big scam involving email, but not the usual kind of email scam that we're all used to.
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Re: The History of Email

Postby pcslim » Thu Sep 04, 2014 3:57 pm

Huffington Post Finally Responds, Stands By Its Completely Bogus, Totally Debunked 'History Of Email' Series
Why is it that some people (and companies) just can't admit when they're wrong?
:smack:
“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.

LINK: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140903/18514728409/huffington-post-finally-responds-stands-its-completely-bogus-totally-debunked-history-email-series.shtml
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Re: The History of Email

Postby a2z » Fri Sep 05, 2014 7:53 pm

Huffington Post And The View From Bogustan: Standing Behind Blatantly False Claims Isn't Journalism
Errors like this are easy to avoid. All it takes is a little fact checking. All the info is readily available online. There's really no excuse.
The thing that's truly baffling here isn't that HuffPo and HuffPo Live are doing "the view from nowhere," but that they're actually actively promoting a lie. It's the view from Bogustan. Rather than promoting the truth or presenting false balance, Huffington Post is actively claiming that a clearly false story is true -- and when presented with reams of evidence on that front, it appears that the company is simply throwing up its hands and hoping the whole story just blows over.

LINK: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140905/10463128432/huffington-post-view-bogustan-standing-behind-blatantly-false-claims-isnt-journalism.shtml
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