The other day, I got snookered.
On Aug. 30, I tweeted: “Happy birthday, email! 30 years old today!â€
(Whereupon a fellow Twitterite, @bschorr, responded: “Little known fact: the 2nd e-mail sent 30 years ago started: ‘Dear friend, I am Humabli Kiprotich from Nigeria…'â€)
I tweeted my message because I'd received a press release about it. “Today, August 30th, marks the 30th anniversary of email,†it said. “While the technology that we live by has come a long way since it was first copyrighted, we are still using the same To: From: Cc: Subject: Reply, Forward fields.†The press release went on to plug an e-mail service.
I did a quick check - I found this confirmation on what looked like Politico - and then tweeted.
But then I got the most intriguing note from Thomas Haigh, a technology historian, chairman of a professional group dedicated to information technology history, and “career academicâ€- via e-mail. It went like this:
A colleague sent me a copy of your tweet, “Happy birthday to EMAIL! 30 years old today!†I'm afraid that you've inadvertently endorsed the propaganda campaign of V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who has been mounting a vigorous but quixotic effort to convince the world that he invented email as a schoolboy between 1978 and 1982. He mounts his case at www.inventorofemail.com. However, his claims have been almost universally rejected by technology experts and historians, on the simple basis that you can't invent something during (or after) 1978 that was already in widespread use by that time.
Email, or electronic mail, is actually at least 40 years old, and the NY Times itself has documented its use in 1965 (4 7 years ago). Hence, collecting endorsements for the “30 year anniversary†claim, i.e. 1982 as the origin date for email, is an key strategy for Ayyadurai.
Ayyadurai is determined, wealthy, and an expert on internet publicity. He has assembled a network of websites and send out a series of press releases. The site you link to, Politico.biz, seems to be some kind of low-rent content farm, recycling stories and press releases such as Ayyadurai's, rather than a real news organization. He has misled a number of journalists on the lifestyle technology beat, including bloggers Emi Kolawole at The Washington Post and Doug Aamoth at Time. He was dismissed from his part-time teaching position at M.I.T. as a result of the embarrassment he caused the institution. Sometimes I wonder if the whole thing is some kind of postmodern performance art project, designed to show up the shortcomings of digital-age journalism!
I have a thorough treatment of his claims, based on an a rticle commissioned by the Washington Post after its ombudsman realized the paper had published a deeply inaccurate story.
Now, of course, you have no way to know I'm not the crank here, so here are some other treatments from Gizmodo, Techdirt, the Washington Post ombudsman and the Columbia Review of Journalism.
You've been around the technology world a long time, so I'm sure you would not have been misled for longer than it took to tweet. But Ayyadurai collects endorsements aggressively (he's very proud of convincing Noam Chomsky!) so I wonder if there is any way for you to tweet or blog a correction making clear that you are not endorsing his claims.
Yes, Tom, I'm happy to do so.
As the Gizmodo article puts it, “Shiva Ayyadurai didn't invent e-mail - he created ‘EMAIL,' an electronic mail system implemented at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. It's doubtful he realized it as a little teen, but laying cl aim 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.â€
Anyway - what a weird, whacked-out story. It's so delicious, in fact, that I'm not even sorry I posted that bogus tweet in the first place.
And I wish e-mail the happiest of anniversaries - whenever it truly comes around.
