4 ms·

Reading your post, and the linked article, I'd be interested in examples where the previous systems failed to provide expected functionality... My expectation

by 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
- scj 9y ago
  Thomas Edison was the first to invent a light bulb for the masses. In many ways, that is a more impressive invention than a one-off that only illuminated a single room. But Edison didn't invent the light bulb. Likewise, Babbage was dealing with the primitives of computation. He couldn't even get those primitives working. So both his UX and backend were unusable. So what should historians do? They give credit to Babbage for his work, but then talk about the work of 20th century scientists and engineers separately. There are a lot of people who made contributions to computing. I think there is a difference between "wrote a great email client[0]" and "invented email." Writing a great email client is cool. But I think trying to inflate that accomplishment into making it sound like email didn't exist beforehand (thus diminishing the contributions of others) is wrong. Take a look at RFC 733[1] from 1977. It sounds a lot like email. As a bonus, they are talking about interoperability, which I think is a really important feature for email. A feature that I suspect Ayyadurai's client did not provide (but I could be wrong). From the arstechnica link, it sounds like the earliest Ayyadurai started the work was in summer of 1978. At best, he can claim he independently invented and developed concepts that were publicly understood (even if he was unaware of the work going on elsewhere). But the truth is that the public doesn't care about someone writing a piece of software (unless the author became a billionaire for doing so). So the only claim that would get any attention is "inventor of..." [0] I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and assert the email client was great. With 500 users[0.1] it certainly didn't popularise the technology. [0.1] 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... [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc733 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc733

by scj 9y ago

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

scj 9y ago
Thomas Edison was the first to invent a light bulb for the masses. In many ways, that is a more impressive invention than a one-off that only illuminated a single room. But Edison didn't invent the light bulb. Likewise, Babbage was dealing with the primitives of computation. He couldn't even get those primitives working. So both his UX and backend were unusable. So what should historians do? They give credit to Babbage for his work, but then talk about the work of 20th century scientists and engineers separately. There are a lot of people who made contributions to computing. I think there is a difference between "wrote a great email client[0]" and "invented email." Writing a great email client is cool. But I think trying to inflate that accomplishment into making it sound like email didn't exist beforehand (thus diminishing the contributions of others) is wrong. Take a look at RFC 733[1] from 1977. It sounds a lot like email. As a bonus, they are talking about interoperability, which I think is a really important feature for email. A feature that I suspect Ayyadurai's client did not provide (but I could be wrong). From the arstechnica link, it sounds like the earliest Ayyadurai started the work was in summer of 1978. At best, he can claim he independently invented and developed concepts that were publicly understood (even if he was unaware of the work going on elsewhere). But the truth is that the public doesn't care about someone writing a piece of software (unless the author became a billionaire for doing so). So the only claim that would get any attention is "inventor of..." [0] I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and assert the email client was great. With 500 users[0.1] it certainly didn't popularise the technology. [0.1] 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... [1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc733 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc733