4 ms·

Yes. Chomsky knew him when he was at MIT and has come to his defense.[1] I admit my initial reaction was "of course this guy's a charlatan," and read 10 things

Yes. Chomsky knew him when he was at MIT and has come to his defense.[1] I admit my initial reaction was "of course this guy's a charlatan," and read 10 things that seems to support that. For example here is a review of the development of e-mail primitives prior to Ayyadurai's work.[2] It starts out pretty level headed, but later on in the updates to Ayyadurai's responses it gets more defensive and flustered in tone, and the technical arguments become impenetrable -- which to me are signs that there's more substance to Ayyadurai's claim than you might think. The heart of the matter is that many of the primitives of what became e-mail developed in the 70s, but the question is what constituted a fully integrated user-friendly inter-organizational system. Ayyadurai's showpiece of evidence is that Dave Crocker stated in 1977 that "At this stage, no attempt is being made to emulate a full-scale inter-organization mail system" that confirmed to the "cognitive model of a regular office-memo system".[3] Crocker has since walked back[4] that claim and said his report doesn't say what it says... It's very odd. It very clearly states, right in the summary, that the "cognitive models" and "psychological aspects" did not yet match what "typical users" expected of messaging systems. And looking back through [2], I see a lot of words but no evidence that there was a functioning, user-friendly system that addressed these "psychological aspects" prior to Ayyadurai. So basically, it does seem plausible that he brought these concepts together in a way no one had quite done before, in his basement when he was 14 or whatever, and him being all self-congratualtory about it really pisses the "establishment Internet guys" off that worked on all these primitives. Maybe it's me, but honestly this all smacks of the classic "engineers don't appreciate UX design" conflict. "Oh you just figured out some UI stuff.. that's not real engineering..." [1] http://www.inventorofemail.com/noam-chomsky-on-invention-of-email-va-shiva-ayyadurai.asp http://www.inventorofemail.com/noam-chomsky-on-invention-of-... [2] http://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai http://www.sigcis.org/ayyadurai [3] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3318894-R2134.html#document/p18/a338655 https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3318894-R2134.html#d... [4] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-convince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-m...

scj 9y ago
Reading your post, and the linked article, I'd be interested in examples where the previous systems failed to provide expected functionality... My expectation of email today is "I enter some address(es), define the addresses as TO, CC, and BCC, type a message into the body (or extend an existing message) and send the contents to a server which then re-transmits it as necessary." That's the core of email... Every email program I've ever used can handle those elements, sometimes with only plaintext, but that's the core I learned decades ago. I wonder when that would have been available. I suspect that multiple people should be credited with advancing this tech. It is likely that the title "inventor of email" is a one-sided and incorrect view of history. Sutherland and Engelbart pioneered GUI technology, but I wouldn't want to use the system either created. However to deny them credit in the development of the GUI (Engelbart in particular), would be re-writing history.
- abalone 9y ago
  "Inventor of email" is definitely a self-congratulatory provocation guaranteed to piss people off. But to your point, those are indeed essential functions, but not all systems in the 70s integrated them well. For example John Vittal created a system called MSG that had many of those elements[1], but by his own admission "Its major drawback is that it does not have a directly integrated message creation facility with the same style of user-interface as the rest of MSG."[2] So for this and other reasons Ayyadurai deems it not meeting the standard of a "full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system," which is basically how he is defining "email". This is all about where to draw the line on what constitutes "email" and who crossed it first. We should know by now, as an industry, that UX really matters, and so there may be some merit to focusing on how primitives are packaged together in a sufficiently usable form, not just when each of them came into existence separately. I do agree that brandishing terms like "inventor" are not the way to approach this. It was a collective effort. But I also have become a bit sympathetic to his feeling shut out of the history of Internet by establishment, working-for-government-labs coterie. Maybe that motivated him to be more outspoken and provocative. On some level we should be celebrating that a 14 year old kid, in a working on his own with little support, could figure out a complete system in a way that govt labs couldn't -- not diminishing it as lesser than "inventing the @ convention" or whatever. That's part of the hacker ethos at the core of what we all do. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-convince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-m... [2] http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp
eesmith 9y ago
I don't see the substance to his claim. I think I've used email since the 1980s. I think I still use email. Yet I have never used an email client with the essential elements that Ayyadurai claims an email system must have. For example, in the mid 1990s my mail email client was BSD Mail in the terminal, and a local Sendmail. There was no relational system, no address book, no printing, and so on. Does that mean I didn't really use email in the 1990s? Or does it mean that Ayyadurai's definition is too specific? I think it's the latter. Perhaps I don't appreciate UX design, but it also feels like Ayyadurai doesn't appreciate the work of the scores of people who came before him.
- abalone 9y ago
  This is about what happened in the 70s, so 80s-onward experience is not relevant. I think he also feels his work is not appreciated by the establishment. In all of this I don't see many people really examining how his system worked and what problems it solved. They're very focused on arguing that this or that piece existed earlier, so he has no claim. Part of it is his fault for laying claim to such a grandiose title. But I'm also feeling there is a typical lack of appreciation among his critics for what we would now call UX work, i.e. making a usable system.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    I don't think I made my point clearly enough. Was I, in the 1980s and 1990s, using email, when I didn't use a system which has the features that he says are required to be called "email"? If I wasn't using email, then he's using a definition which is highly idiosyncratic. If I was using email, then people before him, in the 1970s, were using email. More specifically, which feature finally made a simple text mail client like BSD Mail become "email". The concept "usable" is effectively meaningless. You can always change the threshold. Gmail is far more usable than his system was.
    - abalone 9y ago
      > The concept "usable" is effectively meaningless. I mean come on, that can't be true. You've just invalidated the whole field of UX and perhaps the most defining aspect of breakthrough products. Yes, it's hard to define and up to debate. That's why there's a debate. But it doesn't help to say, we can't talk about it, only concrete primitives. As to his definition of email, I think you're mixing up his program's specific feature list (printing, relational DB, etc.) with his definition, which is more general. Having said that I do think it's a bit too strong to require 100% compliance to his definition, like requiring an address book.[1] Having said that, when we compare that list to what was available in 1978 it's much starker how advanced it was (assuming it actually worked). [1] http://www.inventorofemail.com/definition_of_email.asp http://www.inventorofemail.com/definition_of_email.asp
nate_meurer 9y ago
I think you're doing a bit of a dance around the ridiculousness of Shiva's claims. The handful of elements (inbox, outbox, Drafts, Subject, Cc:, Bcc: etc) to which you refer as UX were obviously and intuitively derived from the existing paper office mail systems of the day. These were completely obvious UX targets for any computer system that sought to emulate office mail, and I've seen no evidence that Shiva's EMAIL system influenced the evolution of the system we now know as email in any way. He's not just self-congratulatory. He blames his lack of recognition on a "deep-state" conspiracy involving the military-industrial complex. And racism [0]. And let's not forget how he publicly disparaged Ray Tomlinson as a liar [1]. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6lfinq/im_shiva_and_ill_be_your_next_united_states/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6lfinq/im_shiva... 1 - https://mobile.twitter.com/va_shiva/status/706670699713335297 https://mobile.twitter.com/va_shiva/status/70667069971333529...

scj 9y ago

Reading your post, and the linked article, I'd be interested in examples where the previous systems failed to provide expected functionality... My expectation of email today is "I enter some address(es), define the addresses as TO, CC, and BCC, type a message into the body (or extend an existing message) and send the contents to a server which then re-transmits it as necessary." That's the core of email... Every email program I've ever used can handle those elements, sometimes with only plaintext, but that's the core I learned decades ago. I wonder when that would have been available. I suspect that multiple people should be credited with advancing this tech. It is likely that the title "inventor of email" is a one-sided and incorrect view of history. Sutherland and Engelbart pioneered GUI technology, but I wouldn't want to use the system either created. However to deny them credit in the development of the GUI (Engelbart in particular), would be re-writing history.

abalone 9y ago
"Inventor of email" is definitely a self-congratulatory provocation guaranteed to piss people off. But to your point, those are indeed essential functions, but not all systems in the 70s integrated them well. For example John Vittal created a system called MSG that had many of those elements[1], but by his own admission "Its major drawback is that it does not have a directly integrated message creation facility with the same style of user-interface as the rest of MSG."[2] So for this and other reasons Ayyadurai deems it not meeting the standard of a "full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system," which is basically how he is defining "email". This is all about where to draw the line on what constitutes "email" and who crossed it first. We should know by now, as an industry, that UX really matters, and so there may be some merit to focusing on how primitives are packaged together in a sufficiently usable form, not just when each of them came into existence separately. I do agree that brandishing terms like "inventor" are not the way to approach this. It was a collective effort. But I also have become a bit sympathetic to his feeling shut out of the history of Internet by establishment, working-for-government-labs coterie. Maybe that motivated him to be more outspoken and provocative. On some level we should be celebrating that a 14 year old kid, in a working on his own with little support, could figure out a complete system in a way that govt labs couldn't -- not diminishing it as lesser than "inventing the @ convention" or whatever. That's part of the hacker ethos at the core of what we all do. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-mans-quest-to-convince-the-world-that-he-invented-e-mail/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/shivas-war-one-m... [2] http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp http://www.inventorofemail.com/claims_about_email.asp

eesmith 9y ago

I don't see the substance to his claim. I think I've used email since the 1980s. I think I still use email. Yet I have never used an email client with the essential elements that Ayyadurai claims an email system must have. For example, in the mid 1990s my mail email client was BSD Mail in the terminal, and a local Sendmail. There was no relational system, no address book, no printing, and so on. Does that mean I didn't really use email in the 1990s? Or does it mean that Ayyadurai's definition is too specific? I think it's the latter. Perhaps I don't appreciate UX design, but it also feels like Ayyadurai doesn't appreciate the work of the scores of people who came before him.

abalone 9y ago
This is about what happened in the 70s, so 80s-onward experience is not relevant. I think he also feels his work is not appreciated by the establishment. In all of this I don't see many people really examining how his system worked and what problems it solved. They're very focused on arguing that this or that piece existed earlier, so he has no claim. Part of it is his fault for laying claim to such a grandiose title. But I'm also feeling there is a typical lack of appreciation among his critics for what we would now call UX work, i.e. making a usable system.
- eesmith 9y ago
  I don't think I made my point clearly enough. Was I, in the 1980s and 1990s, using email, when I didn't use a system which has the features that he says are required to be called "email"? If I wasn't using email, then he's using a definition which is highly idiosyncratic. If I was using email, then people before him, in the 1970s, were using email. More specifically, which feature finally made a simple text mail client like BSD Mail become "email". The concept "usable" is effectively meaningless. You can always change the threshold. Gmail is far more usable than his system was.
  - abalone 9y ago
    > The concept "usable" is effectively meaningless. I mean come on, that can't be true. You've just invalidated the whole field of UX and perhaps the most defining aspect of breakthrough products. Yes, it's hard to define and up to debate. That's why there's a debate. But it doesn't help to say, we can't talk about it, only concrete primitives. As to his definition of email, I think you're mixing up his program's specific feature list (printing, relational DB, etc.) with his definition, which is more general. Having said that I do think it's a bit too strong to require 100% compliance to his definition, like requiring an address book.[1] Having said that, when we compare that list to what was available in 1978 it's much starker how advanced it was (assuming it actually worked). [1] http://www.inventorofemail.com/definition_of_email.asp http://www.inventorofemail.com/definition_of_email.asp

nate_meurer 9y ago

I think you're doing a bit of a dance around the ridiculousness of Shiva's claims. The handful of elements (inbox, outbox, Drafts, Subject, Cc:, Bcc: etc) to which you refer as UX were obviously and intuitively derived from the existing paper office mail systems of the day. These were completely obvious UX targets for any computer system that sought to emulate office mail, and I've seen no evidence that Shiva's EMAIL system influenced the evolution of the system we now know as email in any way. He's not just self-congratulatory. He blames his lack of recognition on a "deep-state" conspiracy involving the military-industrial complex. And racism [0]. And let's not forget how he publicly disparaged Ray Tomlinson as a liar [1]. 0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6lfinq/im_shiva_and_ill_be_your_next_united_states/ https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/6lfinq/im_shiva... 1 - https://mobile.twitter.com/va_shiva/status/706670699713335297 https://mobile.twitter.com/va_shiva/status/70667069971333529...