In the Summer of 1978, V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai (Ayyadurai), then a sophomore in high school was accepted to a gifted students summer program at the prestigious Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, in a program to educate America's finest youth on computer programming. In the Fall of that year, he was offered a position as a research fellow at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) to develop the world's first EMAIL System. Shiva, then only 14, built the first EMAIL system and received the first U.S. Copyright for EMAIL. He went on to be recognized by the Westinghouse Science Talent Search for this innovation, at a time when few knew of the value of EMAIL.

It all began in the Summer of 1978, when Shiva got accepted into a gifted student's program to learn Computer Science at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. The program was started by Professor Henry Mullish, a visionary, who recognized the importance of training America's finest in programming of software and computers. This was an intensive 8-week program. All programming was done on old punch cards. Shiva graduated with Distinction and was one of the youngest of the entire group of 40 students who were accepted from across the United States. He also won a special Computer Arts award for artwork he developed using ARTSPEAK, one of the earliest computer graphic languages.

FORTRAN IV had a six letter limit on naming variables and subroutines.“EMAIL” was chosen as the name of the program in 1978. This printout submitted to the US Copyright Office and donated to the Smithsonian shows part of the original code.

This article appeared in the West Essex Tribune entitled “Livingston Student Designs Electronic Mail System” on October 30, 1980.

Shiva Ayyadurai, 16, then a senior at Livingston High School developed the EMAIL system as a part of an Independent Study Program. Each day he traveled nearly 30 miles to the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey's campus in Newark, NJ to develop this EMAIL system, which converted the paper mail system used by doctors to send memos interdepartmentally. The system served to interconnect the two other locations of UMDNJ at Piscataway, NJ as well as New Brunswick, NJ. This system was the precursor to modern systems such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and others.

This is the original of the Westinghouse Award Entry that Shiva submitted to the Talent Search Committee in 1981. This is a must read for history aficionados. The review of this document is what was used to determine the issuance of the Westinghouse Science Talent Honors Award.

Skimming it is looking back at history. It was type written with an architectural of the first EMAIL system done by hand! Programs like Powerpoint, Adobe, etc. did not exist then.

The Westinghouse Science Talent Search, now known as the Intel Science Talent Search, according to Wikipedia is “...a research-based science competition in the United States for high school students. It has been referred to as ‘the nation's oldest and most prestigious’ science competition, and the Westinghouse/Intel awards have been referred to as the ‘Baby Nobels.’”

In 1981, V. A. Shiva Ayyadurai was recognized for “The Software Design, Development and Implementation of a High-Reliability Network-Wide Electronic Mail System.” This system was the first of its kind. While Shiva himself said, “I had no idea what I was developing, except that I just loved programming, writing code and was excited at seeing an EMAIL being sent from one person to another.” The reviewers of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search clearly knew the value of Shiva's EMAIL innovation nearly 30 years ago.

The incoming Class of 1985 to MIT entered in the Fall of 1981. Shiva was one of the 1,040 students who MIT accepted that year. The front-page article in Tech Talk, MIT's official newspaper highlighted the work of three incoming students. One of them was Shiva.

Clearly, where many are so accomplished entering an incoming class, to highlight the EMAIL innovation , MIT obviously knew of the importance of EMAIL. Shiva went on during his few years while at MIT to consult as a Research Fellow for UMDNJ to continue additional work on the first EMAIL system he pioneered.

In 1982, the U.S. Copyright Office issued TXu-111-775, the first Copyright for EMAIL, to Shiva Ayyadurai. At that time, the only protection available for software was through Copyright. The U.S. intellectual property laws, at that time, treated software similar to music, art or literary work. The original Copyright application was submitted in 1980, following completion of the EMAIL software, two years after Shiva began its development starting in 1978.

This was the first system of its kind offering an easy-to-use user interface, highly reliable and network-wide. It was developed in an environment for use by medical doctors and their assistants to transport electronic mail, as a replacement to their then paper mail system.

Dr. Leslie Michelson, Ph.D., a former physicist was Shiva's great mentor. He was, as Shiva recalls, “brilliant and could write so well.” Dr. Michelson recruited Shiva to be a Research Fellow in his Lab after hearing about his impressive work and results at the NYU Summer program. He gave Shiva his first paying programming job in the Fall of 1978. He earned $1.25 per hour. The screen you see on the left was the size of the display that one had to work with. If you look closely, you can see the world's first EMAIL system's user interface.

Every software system needs a User's Manual, so did the world's first EMAIL system. At that time, Shiva was everything on the project: software engineer, network manager, project manager, architect, quality assurance AND technical writer.

The User's Manual for which he received Copyright TXu-108-715 was also tested. He wrote and updated multiple versions based on feedback from his user base of doctors. It had to be easy-to-read and clear.

In 1984, the U.S. Copyright Office issued TXu-169-126, the first Copyright for EMS (EMAIL Management System), to (V.A.) Shiva Ayyadurai. The EMAIL copyright had been awarded to Shiva two years earlier. This copyright recognized his additional contribution for creating all the internal tools needed by system administrators to maintain EMAIL and messages long-term, e.g. archiving, password management, etc.

Even in 1984, the only protection available for software was through Copyright. The U.S. intellectual property laws, at that time, treated software similar to music, art or literary work. The original Copyright application was submitted in 1980, following completion of the EMAIL software, two years after Shiva began its development starting in 1978.

This patent was awarded in recognition for Shiva's unique contribution to create a holistic and integrated system for electronic management of on-line relationships through the use of ANY asynchronous electronic messages, including EMAIL. This broad patent was issued after considerable deliberation by the USPTO.

Shiva, at one point, was asked to appear in Washington, DC at he USPTO to explain aspects, given the broad protection for all asynchronous messaging he was seeking. Finally, the USPTO granted the patent on its unique merits.

In 2004, over 20 years, after creating the worlds' first EMAIL System, Shiva was issued U.S. Patent #6,718,368 for inventing a method for automatically analyzing EMAIL and formulating a response. This patent was issued to Shiva's company General Interactive, LLC, which developed the product EchoMail. EchoMail became the leading application for intelligent EMAIL analysis, sorting and routing used by such companies as Hilton, QVC, Citigroup and others.

The patent enabled the automatic and adaptive retrieval of information from a database while enabling the transmission of reply messages based on content of a received message.

This patent was awarded to Shiva for developing a unique method to route incoming text-based asynchronous communications. The system applied pattern analysis methods of Feature Extraction, Clustering and Learning, deploying a hybrid and integrated systems model of nearly 19 different technologies in a unique frame work.