Noam Chomsky -- linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and all around critic -- has weighed into the debate over who invented email Photo: Andrew Rusk/Flickr
Who invented email? That’s a question sure to spark some debate. And where there’s debate, the appearance of Noam Chomsky should come as no surprise.
This week, Chomsky — the professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at MIT who’s known as much for his criticism of US foreign policy and capitalism as much as his academic work — unexpectedly joined the debate over the origins of email, putting his weight behind V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, a man who claims he invented email as in 1978 at the age of 14 while working at a medical and dentistry university in New Jersey.
Today, Ayyadurai is a lecturer at MIT, and he once studied with Chomsky. But Chomsky says he backs Ayyadurai’s claims for reasons of, yes, semantics.
“Email, upper case, lower case, any case, is the electronic version of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system, the email we all experience today — and email was invented in 1978 by a 14-year-old working in Newark, NJ. The facts are indisputable,” reads a statement from Chomsky that fired across the internet in a press release from Ayyadurai.
Yes, by 1978, people were already sending electronic messages across computer networks, but Ayyadurai says he was the first person to build a software program called “email” — and that he was the first to structure electronic communications in a way that mirrored methods traditionally used to move paper mail through an office, setting up electronic “inboxes” and “outboxes” and “address books.”
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