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 sin

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