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Who invented email?

Ray Tomlinson got initial credit for the invention of email. He was an American computer programmer who tried for the very first time to invent the email system on ARPANET in 1971.

The credit for implementing the “@” sign goes to Tomlinson. He first developed the TENEX Operating System. He wrote the file program for file transfer called CPYNET. Thanks to that, files could be transferred through the ARPANET network.

In a 2011 article published by Time Magazine, Shiva Ayyadurai claimed he invented email, as a teenager; in August 1982 he registered the copyright on an email application he had written. Historians strongly dispute this account, however, because email was already in use in the early 1970s. He claims he was the first person to write a full-scale electronic emulation of the interoffice and an inter-organizational mailing system that consists of Inbox, Outbox, Folder, and many more other email features.

Shiva Ayyaduari claimed that he invented email features like To, From, CC, BCC, Subject, Body, Attachments. Tomlinson argues with this fact, as he says many of these CC, From, BCC were his inventions.

Ayyadurai is notable for his widely disputed claim of being the “inventor of email”. His claim is based on an electronic mail software called “EMAIL”, an implementation of interoffice email system, which he wrote as a 14-year-old student at Livingston High School, New Jersey in 1979. Initial reports that repeated Ayyadurai's assertion — from organizations such as The Washington Post and the Smithsonian Institution — were followed by public retractions. These corrections were triggered by objections from historians and ARPANET pioneers who pointed out that email was already actively used in the early 1970s. Ayyadurai started a campaign in 2011 in which he rebranded himself as the “Inventor of Email” and, according to a paper published in Information & Culture, “provoked a dramatic succession of exaggerated claims, credulous reporters, retractions, and accusations that a cabal of industry insiders and corrupt Wikipedia editors are colluding to hide the truth.”

A November 2011 Time Techland interview by Doug Aamoth, entitled “The Man Who Invented Email”, argued that EMAIL represented the birth of email “as we currently know it”. In that interview, Ayyadurai recalled that Les Michelson, the former particle scientist at Brookhaven National Labs who assigned Ayyadurai the project, had the idea of creating an electronic mail system that uses the header conventions of a hardcopy memorandum. Ayyadurai recalled Michelson as saying: “Your job is to convert that into an electronic format. Nobody's done that before.”

In February 2012, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History announced that Ayyadurai had donated “a trove of documents and code” related to EMAIL. Initially, the museum—inaccurately—cited the program as one of the first to include the now common “subject and body fields, inboxes, outboxes, cc, bcc, attachments, and others. He based these elements directly off of the interoffice mail memos the doctors had been using for years, in hopes of convincing people to actually use the newfangled technology.”

Ayyadurai's claims drew editorial clarifications and corrections, as well as criticism from industry observers. In a follow-up to its acquisition announcement, the Smithsonian stated that it was not claiming that Ayyadurai had invented email, but rather that the materials were historically notable for other reasons related to trends in computer education and the role of computers in medicine. The Smithsonian statement distinguished Ayyadurai's achievement by noting that historians in the field, “have largely focused on the use of large networked computers, especially those linked to the ARPANET in the early 1970s”. The statement pointed out that Ayyadurai's approach instead “focused on communications between linked computer terminals in an ordinary office situation”. The Washington Post also followed up with a correction of errors in its earlier report on the Smithsonian acquisition, stating that it incorrectly referred to Ayyadurai as the inventor of electronic messaging; the 'bcc', 'cc', 'to' and 'from' fields existed previously; Ayyadurai had not been honored as the “inventor of email”.

Writing for Gizmodo, Sam Biddle argued that email was developed a decade before EMAIL, beginning with Ray Tomlinson's sending the first text letter between two ARPANET-connected computers in 1971. Biddle quoted Tomlinson: “[We] had most of the headers needed to deliver the message (to:, cc:, etc.) as well as identifying the sender (from:) and when the message was sent (date:) and what the message was about.” Biddle allowed for the possibility that Ayyadurai may have coined the term “EMAIL” and used the header terms without being aware of earlier work, but maintained that the historical record isn't definitive on either point. Biddle wrote that “laying claim to the name of a product that's the generic term for a universal technology gives you acres of weasel room. But creating a type of airplane named AIRPLANE doesn't make you Wilbur Wright.”

Thomas Haigh, a historian of information technology at the University of Wisconsin, wrote that “Ayyadurai is, to the best of my knowledge, the only person to have claimed for him or herself the title 'inventor of email'.” Haigh argued that while EMAIL was impressive for a teenager's work, it contained no features that were not present on previous electronic mail systems and had no obvious influence on later systems. “The most striking thing about Ayyadurai's claim to have invented electronic mail is how late it comes. Somehow it took him thirty years to alert the world to [his] greatest achievement”. Haigh wrote that by 1980, “electronic mail had been in use at MIT for 15 years, Xerox had built a modern, mouse-driven graphical email system for office communication, Compuserve was selling email access to the public, and email had for many years been the most popular application on what was soon to become the Internet.”[86]: 27  Haigh wrote that Ayyadurai had created “infographic” outlines for his view of history and published the assembled documents under various domain names that he had registered to support his claim. Through his infographics, wrote Haigh, Ayyadurai presented his claims that he “designed and deployed the first version of electronic [mail] system” in 1980, although electronic mail as an executable program was used under the name “Electronic Mail System” before.

David Crocker, a member of the ARPANET research community, writing in the Post, said, “The reports incorrectly credited [EMAIL's] author, a 14-year-old in the late 1970s, as the 'inventor' of email, long after it had become an established service on the ARPANET.” Another computer historian, Marc Weber, a curator at the Computer History Museum, said that by 1978, “nearly all the features we're familiar with today had appeared on one system or another over the previous dozen years”, including emoticons, mailing lists, flame wars, and spam mail.

After the controversy unfolded, MIT disassociated itself from Ayyadurai's EMAIL Lab and funding was dropped. MIT also revoked Ayyadurai's contract to lecture at the bioengineering department.

Ayyadurai characterized the earlier work of Tomlinson, Tom Van Vleck and others as text messaging, rather than an electronic version of an interoffice mail system. Responding to his critics on his personal website, Ayyadurai described EMAIL as “the first of its kind — a fully integrated, database-driven, electronic translation of the interoffice paper mail system derived from the ordinary office situation.” He maintained that EMAIL was the first electronic mail system to integrate an easy-to-use user interface, a word processor, a relational database, and a modular inter-communications protocol “integrated together in one single and holistic platform to ensure high-reliability and user-friendliness network-wide.” Ayyadurai presented a press release on his webpage asserting that his undergraduate professor Noam Chomsky, of MIT's Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, also supported his claims.

According to various historians, Ayyadurai honed his claims appeal to those with particular political leanings by arguing that his achievements are overlooked due to “racism, anti-immigrant prejudice, historians in the pay of big business, and a belief that only elite and well-funded institutions can create innovations.” In March 2016, Ayyadurai complained about Raytheon, where Tomlinson worked on ARPANET. After Tomlinson's death, Ayyadurai told The Hindu that he believed that news outlets retracted their stories about him because, “Raytheon advertises in publications like the Huffington Post and CNN” and that if he were “a white guy and had a copyright for email, I would have my photo on every stamp in the world.” The day after Tomlinson's death, Ayyadurai tweeted: “I'm the low-caste, dark-skinned, Indian, who DID invent #email. Not Raytheon, who profits for war & death. Their mascot Tomlinson dies a liar”.