Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai’s Statement On the Invention of Email:
Response to the 14 Articles About Him at Techdirt.com
Posted September 2014 to November 2016 [1]

This Statement provides a brief summary of the extensive factual and historical data located at www.inventorofemail.com that contains testimonials from prominent experts in the technology industry explaining Dr. Ayyadurai’s invention of modern day email.

In 1978, when Shiva Ayyadurai was a 14-year-old Research Fellow at the College of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (today, known as Rutgers Medical School), he wrote 50,000 lines of software code to create an electronic system —the first of its kind— to replicate the myriad features of the interoffice paper-based mail system, which included many of the key components of modern day email, including the Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Folders, Trash, Attachment, Address Book, Compose, Forward, Reply, Return Receipt, and the Memo, with the (now ubiquitous) terms, “To,” “From,” “Date,” “Subject,” “Cc,” and “Bcc.”

Dr. Ayyadurai named this system “email,” a term he was the first to create since he was inventing the “electronic” (or “e”) version of the interoffice paper-based “mail” system. His naming of “email” also arose out of the limited parameters of the programming language and operating system, which limited program names to all capital letters and a five-character limit: thus, his selection of the letters “E” “M” “A” “I” “L.”

On August 30, 1982, Dr. Ayyadurai obtained the first U.S. copyright for this system, “EMAIL”. At the time, Copyright Law was the only mechanism to protect software inventions because the U.S. Supreme Court decisions at the time held that software could not be patented.

Dr. Ayyadurai invented email to manage the complexity of interoffice communications, and also to reduce the use of paper documents. He designed email to be accessible to ordinary people with little or no computer experience, at a time when computers were mainly used by highly-trained technical people.

Following his invention, Dr. Ayyadurai went on to earn four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT): a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, an M.S. in Visual Studies from the Media Laboratory, an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Biological Engineering.

Dr. Ayyadurai made ongoing contributions to the advancement of email technology, including: creating EchoMail, an award-winning technology for enterprise email management featured in MIT’s Technology Review; being awarded three United States patents for automatic analysis, categorization and routing of email; winning a White House Competition for automatic classification of President Bill Clinton’s email; and, being commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General to develop email and digital technologies to modernize the U.S. Postal Service.

To be clear, Dr. Ayyadurai does not claim to have invented (nor has he ever claimed to have invented) electronic messaging. Methods for the transport of messages through electrical and electronic devices date back to the 1840s with the inventions of the telegraph and Morse Code. Dr. Ayyadurai also acknowledges that prior to 1978, many other individuals made important contributions toward the development of electronic messaging. However, Dr. Ayyadurai’s 1978 invention was the first to embody the features we experience today in modern email.

On November 15, 2011, TIME magazine published an article titled “The Man Who Invented Email,” which outlines the backstory of email and Dr. Ayyadurai’s invention. In June 2012, Wired magazine reported: “Email ... the electronic version of the interoffice, inter- organizational mail system, the email we all experience today, was invented in 1978 by [Dr. Ayyadurai] ... The facts are indisputable.” In July 2015, CBS reported on The Henry Ford Innovation Nation, hosted by Mo Rocca: “Next time your fingers hit the keyboard to write a quick email, you might want to say, thank you to Shiva Ayyadurai.... he is credited with inventing email .... in the late 1970s.”

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“The efforts to belittle the innovation of a 14-year-old child should lead to reflection on the larger story of how power is gained, maintained, and expanded, and the need to encourage, not undermine, the capacities for creative inquiry that are widely shared and could flourish, if recognized and given the support they deserve.

They suggest an effort to dismiss the fact that innovation can take place by anyone, in any place, at any time. And they highlight the need to ensure that innovation must not be monopolized by those with power — power which, incidentally, is substantially a public gift.”

“The facts are black and white on this. There is no gray area. The ARPANET didn't invent email. Ray Tomlinson didn't invent email. And, neither did the so-called 'internet pioneers' of the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email. What the 'internet pioneers' did invent was a revisionist history of email's birth, which this victory exposes.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's work reveals a larger truth that should be evident by now: innovation can happen anywhere, anytime, by anyone. The sooner we do, our lives will be enriched by the thousands of other 'Shivas' that do not have the luxury of working in the established bastions of innovation, but nevertheless have the intellect and the drive to make big contributions.”

“This book is not just about email but about the real life journey of brilliant 14-year-old immigrant kid, who invents email while working in Newark, New Jersey in 1978, inspiring all of us to the infinite possibilities of the American Dream.”

“Email is a system, not the mere exchange of text messages. It is the electronic emulation of a complex systems process that already existed in the interoffice mail processing environment, where collaboration was front and center. An email message, unlike a simple text message, touched multiple sets of people in the intra- and inter-organizational enterprise, to get major tasks done: making decisions, hiring new employees, formalizing contracts, closing business and much more --- in short an integral system for running an organization --- small or large. This is what email was designed for, and it makes absolute sense why it came out of a health sciences institution, where collaboration was critical to day-to-day operations.

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai is the inventor of email --- that enterprise system, which is the mainstay of every organization. He never claimed to be the inventor of 'electronic messaging' as the Smithsonian and Washington Post stated in error, and got completely wrong. There is no controversy here except the one fabricated by these 'internet pioneers' to confuse and mislead journalists. Real journalists and scholars, without vested interests and prejudices, now need to set the record straight.”

“Shiva Ayyadurai is the father of email. For far too long we have all been led to be believe that communication’s greatest innovations came out of defense research, inspired by the needs of war. Email was created in a place of light and cooperation and it is important for people across the world to understand and appreciate this. Why does academic credit matter? Because the journey matters, the motivation matters and history matters to generations of inventors, dreamers and entrepreneurs deserve to know the truth. Big change happens in small places when opportunity meets people who are driven to find answers. That’s how email, as we know it, came to be.”

“In August 1982, the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress registered Shiva Ayyadurai’s email code and user’s manual. According to its records, these were the first works registered under the title, ‘Email,’ preceding the next such registration by two years. Dr. Ayyadurai’s registrations and deposits showed to the world his reduction to practice of his email system.

These registrations were remarkable for a eighteen-year old student, involving non-trivial procedures under a Copyright Act only recently open to protecting software. Protecting software creations by copyright was the common wisdom of the day. Not only were patents largely disfavored during decades preceding the creation in 1982 of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court had held software unpatentable unless it was adjunct to a physical process. Only in 1994 did the Federal Circuit recognize software as patentable for creating new physical machines in conjunction with the computers the software programmed (recently the Supreme Court limited this principle).

Had the patenting path for software been considered possible in 1982 generally and particularly by the MIT community, I have little doubt that Dr. Ayyadurai would have pursued it. In fact, unlike later software copyright owners who kept their code secret and deposited only identifying portions, Dr. Ayyadurai kept with the original reading of the United States Constitution provision for patents and copyrights to promote disclosure in return for limited exclusivity. Unlike many, in return for protection of his code, Dr. Ayyadurai contributed to the public the ideas shown and searchable in his ‘Email’ deposits in the Library of Congress.”

“As someone who completed a Ph.D. in data communications in the 1970s and built various communication technology companies, the methods at the time for communication between computers were limited to basic exchange of text messages. We at the Deshpande Foundation find Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's invention of email, as a 14-year-old in 1978, an inspiration to all young innovators. His invention symbolizes and expresses what parents around the world want their children to embrace -- that innovation has no boundaries and human potential has no limits.”

“As early as 1972, I used naval messaging between ships and shore stations to transmit and receive electronic text messages using HF/UHF. This was how electronic communications took place in the Navy at the time, and this was via an electronic teletype. Later as a post-graduate officer in the United States Navy during 1978-1979, I sent text messages between computers on an intranet.

Regardless, these rudimentary text messaging systems required complex commands to construct, send and receive a message. None of these systems were email --- the system, we all know today, or what Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai created in 1978.

For example, every message had to be printed out, then was archived in physical file box folders. Sorting was physical, the distribution of the message was manual as it had to be printed and copied on mimeograph machines, at times. There was no electronic Inbox, Outbox, Folders for archiving, Attachments, Address Book, tracking of Deleted Mail, etc. None of these features existed. These early methods for exchanging simple text messages were sufficient for the military's requirement for sending messages from point to point, and were not designed for collaboration as was in the interoffice mail system. The military's particular needs for communications were dictated by an inherent hierarchy that issued orders and directions that needed to be secure with a focus on the direct transfer of messages.

Any attempt at collaborating was time-consuming and manpower intensive. And, those early systems required us to write code and use commands that untrained personnel could not do. It wasn't email.”

“It was remarkable that Shiva built such a large system with the limited resources that he had available. Forgetting even the idea --- just the perseverance of the implementation. Nowadays computer programmers have access to gigabytes worth of memory. We were running systems where Shiva had to write 65,000 lines of code that ran anywhere in 7 to 11 kilobytes, that's thousands, not mega --- millions, not giga --- billions, of memory. Manually segmenting the code, overlays, etc. Just from the sheer point of view of being able to do that with ANY program was a monumental achievement, forgetting aside the innovativeness of what he was actually creating. That was an act of real perseverance. PLUS, he was did it in FORTRAN IV, a language that is dedicated to numbers, and he's doing a text-oriented program.” video link

“I remember vividly my conversations with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai in the early stages of his initiative in 1978 when he was working hard on the creation and development of email. Knowing the basic concept of what he was creating and the fact that it was so innovative, I and another teacher in our science department recommended that he apply for the Westinghouse Talent Search Award for high school students. Email was to be the electronic version of interoffice mail systems. I specifically remember us looking at our school district's Interoffice Mail Envelope and thinking about Dr. Ayyadurai having told me that all the intricacies of this labor intensive system with its creation, delivery, receipt and distribution aspects would one day not be necessary. He had an objective/goal to replace it and other things with his invention. He worked diligently at both his school work and the creation of what we now know as email. Shiva was obviously very successful at both.”

Email is a system designed to be the electronic replica of the many features and functions of the interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system that used paper documents to enable collaboration, cooperation and communication among users of differing expertise within the business office environment. The interoffice mail system consisted of multiple, linked and cooperating systems and processes including:

1) the “secretary’s desktop”: the Typewriter, INBOX, OUTBOX, FOLDERS, ADDRESS BOOK, Paper Clips for ATTACHMENTS, TRASH CAN, and other components;

2) the “interoffice memo” and “interoffice envelope”: TO:, FROM:, SUBJECT:, DATE:, BODY:, CC:, BCC:;

3) multiple methods for processing: FORWARDING, SCANNING, SORTING, DELETING, COMPOSING, ARCHIVING, EDITING, RETURN RECEIPT PROCESSING, and more; and,

4) transportation systems consisting of personnel, pneumatic tubes, mailroom clerks, trucks and vans for the receipt and delivery of the paper documents at different locations.

Email is not the simple exchange of text messages. The simple transfer of text messages, using electronic or electrical devices, beginning with the invention of the Morse code telegraph of the mid 1800s, were referred to by various names including “electric mail,” “electronic mail,” and “electronic messaging” to broadly refer to the “electronification” of text messages. Other such examples included exchange of text messages using the 1939 IBM radio-type; or ARPANET messaging, using the familiar “@” sign, for primitive electronic communications between computers. But, this is not “email” --- the electronic system for emulating the entire interoffice (inter-organizational) mail system --- the system we all know and use today.

Electronic messaging researchers had thought it impossible to create email. For example, in December of 1977, a few months before Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai invented email, David Crocker, an "internet pioneer" in electronic messaging, stated in the detailed Introduction of a seminal RAND Corporation Report that summarized the state-of-the-art research in electronic messaging at the time:

“At this time [December, 1977], no attempt is being made to emulate the full-scale, inter-organizational mail system.”[p.4, Introduction: Framework for Using Message Systems]

“To construct a fully-detailed and monolithic message processing environment requires a much larger effort than has been possible…. In addition, the fact that the system is intended for use in various organizational contexts and by users of differing expertise makes it almost impossible to build a system which responds to all users' needs. Consequently, important segments of a full message environment have received little or no attention.”[pp. 7-10, Introduction: Scope of Specification and Implementation]

These statements reflect the limited scope of the efforts of these "internet pioneers," who were narrowly focused on rudimentary text messaging systems and were proposing minor modifications to expand that rudimentary functionality. The Background section of the Introduction begins by providing the historical context of such rudimentary text messaging systems:

“Time-shared computers typically have a systems which allows their users to pass informal messages among themselves. [The] message system tends to remain relatively simple and used only for terse, infrequent communications.”

The Background expands by providing a summary of those rudimentary text-messaging systems and proposes some ideas on expanding the feature set. In the Operational Model section of the Introduction, basic observations of the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system are provided, demonstrating knowledge of its existence. However, and most importantly, the notion of creating an electronic version of this interoffice, inter-organizational paper-based mail system, within the critical "Scope of Specification and Implementation," section of the Introduction (pp. 7-10), unequivocally states, that such a development is not within the scope of their efforts.

In February 2012 when Dr. Ayyadurai was honored by the Smithsonian, ironically, it was Crocker who was a leader in the defamation campaign to attack Dr. Ayyadurai's work and reputation. When the above Report was discovered and exposed, clearly showing that neither Crocker nor his ARPANET colleagues had any intention to create email, the electronic replica of the interoffice mail system, Crocker contacted Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, likely believing he could soften the expose' of Crocker's historical revisionism. However, Dr. Michelson elected not to speak with him given the damage that Crocker had already done to Dr. Ayyadurai's reputation.

The factual record also shows that the ARPANET information brochure of 1978, and even the one of 1986 (eight years later), makes no reference to the word "email," "e-mail" or "Electronic Mail," neither in the body of the brochure nor in the index of their brochure.

What is absolutely false is to claim that the ARPANET invented email and the "@" is equivalent to email.

In 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai did not think it "impossible" to create a full-scale electronic replica of the inter-organizational paper-based mail system. With a singular intention to create such a system, he succeeded in doing what "internet pioneers" had not only thought impossible but also had no interest in pursuing. He wrote nearly 50,000 lines of code, across an interconnected system of nearly 35 software programs to create the first full-scale electronic replica of the interoffice paper-based mail system that ran across a multi-campus network. The system was technologically decades ahead of its time in using distributed databases, full administrative and management capabilities, with fault detection and resolution --- features necessary for real world use. It was a full-scale production implementation, used by hundreds, and was commercialized --- people were charged and paid to use the system. In summary, it was a success.

He named this system, "EMAIL," a term never used before in the English language. At the time of email's invention, neither copyright law nor patent law existed for protecting software inventions. In 1980, the United States government passed the Computer Software Act of 1980, which amended the Copyright Act of 1976, to protect software inventions through Copyright. In 1981, Dr. Ayyadurai won a prestigious Westinghouse Science Honors Award for his invention of email. In the same year, he applied for a Copyright to protect the invention.

On August 30, 1982, the United States government issued the first U.S. Copyright for "Email," to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai, legally recognizing him as the inventor of email. Three important and indisputable facts, therefore, stand without question: (1) He was the first to create a full-scale electronic replica of the interoffice mail system; (2) He was the first to name this system "email;" and, (3) He received the first U.S. Copyright for "Email," officially recognizing him as the inventor of email.

It was not until 1994 that the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that computer programs were patentable as the equivalent of a "digital machine." Therefore, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai being issued the first Copyright for email in 1982 is of immense historical and legal significance, that cannot be trivialized.

Stephen Y. Chow, one of the world's leading legal experts on intellectual property law, has stated with clarity the importance and historical relevance of the issuance of the Copyright to the teenage inventor:

“In August 1982, the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress registered Shiva Ayyadurai's email code and user's manual. According to its records, these were the first works registered under the title, 'Email,' preceding the next such registration by two years. Dr. Ayyadurai's registrations and deposits showed to the world his reduction to practice of his email system.

These registrations were remarkable for a eighteen-year old student, involving non-trivial procedures under a Copyright Act only recently open to protecting software. Protecting software creations by copyright was the common wisdom of the day. Not only were patents largely disfavored during decades preceding the creation in 1982 of the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals, the Supreme Court had held software unpatentable unless it was adjunct to a physical process. Only in 1994 did the Federal Circuit recognize software as patentable for creating new physical machines in conjunction with the computers the software programmed (recently the Supreme Court limited this principle).

Had the patenting path for software been considered possible in 1982 generally and particularly by the MIT community, I have little doubt that Dr. Ayyadurai would have pursued it. In fact, unlike later software copyright owners who kept their code secret and deposited only identifying portions, Dr. Ayyadurai kept with the original reading of the United States Constitution provision for patents and copyrights to promote disclosure in return for limited exclusivity. Unlike many, in return for protection of his code, Dr. Ayyadurai contributed to the public the ideas shown and searchable in his 'Email' deposits in the Library of Congress.”

Ray Tomlinson modified a pre-existing program called SNDMSG. SNDMSG was not created by Tomlinson. Even before Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG, SNDMSG allowed a user connected to a local computer to append text to an electronic file located on that same local computer. Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG involved copying code from another pre-existing program called CPYNET into the SNDMSG program. CPYNET was a file transfer protocol, which Tomlinson also did not create. Tomlinson's modification allowed a user connected on a local computer to append text to an electronic file located on a remote computer.

This modified version of SNDMSG, like the original SNDMSG, still required the user to have knowledge of cryptic commands, mainly accessible to highly trained technical people, to achieve even this modest result. John Vittal, one of Tomlinson's contemporaries and another "internet pioneer," unequivocally described these early simple systems as rudimentary and incomplete:

“The very simple systems [including] SNDMSG... did not integrate the reading and creation functions, had different user interfaces, and did not provide sufficient functionality for simple message processing.” [John Vittal, 1981]

At best, what Tomlinson "invented," was a "caveman Reddit." Tomlinson, by his own admission, said his modification was a "no brainer." Fourteen-year-old Shiva Ayyadurai, in contrast, wrote 50,000 lines of original software code that implemented numerous features and functions to replicate the entire interoffice mail system, with a very easy-to-use-interface enabling anyone to use the system. This is email --- the email we all know and experience today.

This is not to say that someone else would not have created email, given the march of technology history to integrate computing with office automation. However, the fact remains, Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai was the first to do it. The conflation of Tomlinson's modification to SNDMSG as "email," is a deliberate marketing campaign to enhance the brand value and reputation of Tomlinson's employer, Raytheon/BBN, in the lucrative cybersecurity market (see below).

After inventing email in 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai sought neither recognition nor financial gain for his invention of email. He went on to receive four degrees at MIT in engineering, design and biology. In the midst of his PhD at MIT in 1993, he created EchoMail, a revolutionary artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology that automatically reads, classifies, routes and responds to incoming email --- an innovation that became commercialized after winning an industry-wide competition to classify President Clinton's email messages for the U.S. White House. EchoMail grew to $250 million in value and served the largest Fortune 1000 companies such as Nike, American Express, Unilever and major institutions such as the U.S. Senate.

EchoMail won nearly every major industry award for email management including the Best Messaging Solution Award from IBM in 1997. In 2000, the front-page article of the eminent MIT Technology Review featured Shiva Ayyadurai as "Dr. Email" and shared the many commercial successes of EchoMail. In 2001, The Wall Street Journal highlighted the power of how "EchoMail Can Sort, Answer Deluge of Emails." In 2002, EchoMail received the highest industry rating from Forrester Research for email marketing technology. Today, EchoMail focuses on small businesses to enable them to use the same powerful A.I. technology for intelligent email management in customer service, sales and marketing.

In 2011, Doug Aamoth, the Technology Editor of Time Magazine, after reviewing the artifacts of Dr. Ayyadurai's 1978 invention, wrote a feature story, "The Man Who Invented Email," sharing the facts of email's invention. In 2012, the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) commissioned Dr. Ayyadurai and awarded "The Email Lab," his research group at the International Center for Integrative Systems, two grants totaling nearly $100,000 to develop innovative solutions for saving the ailing USPS using email technology. The two reports were delivered to the USPS leadership's Office of the Inspector General.

That same year, the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH) honored Dr. Ayyadurai by receiving his artifacts documenting his 1978 invention of email. In 2013, Norton and Penguin published his book The Email Revolution. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal commissioned and published Dr. Ayyadurai's essay on "The Future of Email" for their 125th Anniversary issue. More recently, during the 2016 Presidential elections, The New York Times, referring to Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai as the "email pioneer," sought and published his expert commentary on Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server. In 2017, his new book The Future of Email will be hitting the bookstands globally.

He continues to innovate across the fields of medicine and health. His latest invention CytoSolve, a technology platform for eliminating animal testing and accelerating drug development, has been used to discover a new combination therapeutic for pancreatic cancer, gaining FDA allowance to proceed to clinical trials in a record 11 months. CytoSolve has also demonstrated the lack of safety standards of genetically engineered foods (GMOs). He is regularly called upon nationally and internationally to share his experience and expertise in email, innovation, medicine and health. (See Below)

Only when Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's papers were received by the Smithsonian on February 16, 2012, and after a Washington Post reporter wrote an article entitled, "V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai: Inventor of Email Honored by the Smithsonian," did a cabal of "internet pioneers and historians" loyal to the false narrative that the ARPANET and Ray Tomlinson invented email surface to attack Dr. Ayyadurai's lifelong contributions to email. As one MIT professor said,

“When [Shiva’s] material went into the Smithsonian, he threw a wrench into the self-styled and false history of ‘historians’ who had already written the ‘history of email.’ This was like a new fossil being found in Africa which completely changed the origin of humans, and it had to be destroyed.”

The Washington Post article and the facts it shared disrupted Raytheon's multibillion dollar marketing myth contending, among other things, that inserting the "@" sign between the username and the host server is equivalent to inventing email. The first email system, created by Dr. Ayyadurai in 1978 used the "." as the symbol. The "@" symbol is not email, and has been purposefully conflated through a multi-million dollar marketing campaign to be equated to the invention of email.

Raytheon is a major American defense contractor that competes in a robust and expanding $70 billion cybersecurity market. In 2014, Raytheon won $240 million in cybersecurity business and cites “reputation” among “principal competitive factors” considered by customers. They proudly showcase their employee, the late Ray Tomlinson, as “the inventor of email,” to establish this “reputation,” to acquire new clients who need to protect their email. They are now caught between the factual record and their marketing campaigns.

Raytheon and Tomlinson's supporters -- the ARPANET cabal -- used the occasion of Dr. Ayyadurai gaining global recognition in 2012 for the invention of email to discredit him. They unleashed vitriol on the Washington Post reporter and forced the editors to print a completely nebulous correction that Shiva Ayyadurai was "…not the inventor of electronic messaging." However, Dr. Ayyadurai never claimed to be the inventor of "electronic messaging," whose history goes back to the Morse Code telegraph of the 1800s.

Part of this cabal is a group called Special Interest Group for Computers, Information and Society (SIGCIS). Under the aegis of its "scholarly" blog, its chief spokesperson attacked Dr. Ayyadurai as well as any other experts and journalists who dared to share the historical facts about email's origin from Newark, New Jersey. At the same time, this "scholar" thanked "special interests" from Raytheon/BBN and the ARPANET community for supporting and contributing to his verbal lynching of Dr. Ayyadurai. The blog continued to write defamatory comments calling Dr. Ayyadurai a self-promoter and even attacking Dr. Ayyadurai's seminal research in the systems biology of genetically engineered foods (GMOs) - a topic that this group has absolutely no expertise. All of this took place, while these "scholars" and "historians" deliberately ignored the plagiaristic and truly self-promotional history of Raytheon, and praised the "aw shucks" humility of Ray Tomlinson, the non-inventor of email.

Other unethical individuals and internet rags colluded to simply erase the facts and ridiculed journalists such as Mo Rocca of CBS' Henry Ford's Innovation Nation Show and Doug Aamoth of Time Magazine, who shared the truth about email's origin. These individuals included trolls at TechDirt, who parroted false histories of email history to create bogus citations for the heavily censored and manipulated Wikipedia, with its constant revisionism and purges.

Typical revisionism included vengeful and retaliatory Wikipedia edits. For example, following the initial announcement, on November 3, 2016 of Dr. Ayyadurai's victory over Gawker Media, this cabal enforced a "consensus," in Wikipedia parlance, so as to denigrate Dr. Ayyadurai, in the first sentence of his Wikipedia article, as someone merely "notable for his controversial claim to be the 'inventor of email'."

Other surrogates in this attack included none other than David Crocker, and the online "Museum of Email & Digital Communications," where Crocker is listed as an "Analyst" along with Richi Jennings, another "Analyst" at this "museum," who is an active Wikipedia editor removing and manipulating facts on Dr. Ayyadurai's Wikipedia page. Along the same lines, Raytheon's Chief Scientist, who has collegial relations with Crocker, is on the Editorial Board of the journal IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, which publishes false histories of email, while ignoring the 1978 invention of email in Newark, NJ.

The nexus of collusion among the "internet pioneers and historians," and their surrogates is deliberate, as evident in their efforts to create fake news on their blogs, and "scholarly journals" for documenting a false and revisionist history, which trolls on Wikipedia then reference as "fact." This insidious system of generating fake news provides an incredibly tight-knit engine for falsifying the history of email.

This collusion on Wikipedia is best reflected in this email communication received by Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai's assistant Manjula Balaji in 2015 from an experienced Wikipedia editor:

“I seem to have stepped into a mess by accident. [A]s an experienced Wikipedia editor, I had a look at the 'Email' article, and was surprised that you hadn't received credit for your contributions. Since I have had a great deal of experience writing Wikipedia articles, I got right to work and added several suitable additions to provide credit to your contributions. Right away, my edits were deleted, without discussion, not edited to improve them, but just flat-out deleted. This is the kind of behavior an editor encounters when editing an article on the 2nd Amendment, abortion or other extremely hot topics. The response to my edits has included personal attacks, calling me 'ignorant', 'reckless' and the like. Although most editors have been less insulting than that, they have generally been aggressive in rapidly deleting my additions.”

In the winter of 2015, Dr. David Skorton, the new Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, met with Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai and, after hearing the facts, urged him to find an investigative reporter to communicate his experiences. This document and the supplemental materials herein are a start towards supporting such an investigation.

As Dr. Leslie P. Michelson stated, “There is a big motivation to perpetuate the lie that Raytheon/BBN and the so-called 'internet pioneers' invented email.”

Regarding this, one simply needs to consider the core values of Raytheon/BBN and their surrogates when it comes to taking unearned credit. Several years ago, for example, the New York Times Managing Editor David Leonhardt began a scathing expose of William H. Swanson, the CEO of Raytheon, who had published a plagiarized book on “integrity,” by asking:

“What should be the punishment for stealing someone else's work and passing it off as your own?”

Michael A. Padlipsky, one of the leading researchers of the ARPANET community, and the author of nearly 20 RFCs, recollecting his experiences from the ARPANET years of the 1960s and 1970s, wrote in a famous essay, And They Argued All Night...:

“…the [Raytheon] BBN guys always seemed to get to write the histories and hence always seemed to have claimed to have invented everything ….”

And in 2012, following the attacks on Dr. Ayyadurai, Prof. Noam Chomsky of MIT commented:

“The efforts to belittle the innovation of a 14-year-old child should lead to reflection on the larger story of how power is gained, maintained, and expanded, and the need to encourage, not undermine, the capacities for creative inquiry that are widely shared and could flourish, if recognized and given the support they deserve.

They suggest an effort to dismiss the fact that innovation can take place by anyone, in any place, at any time. And they highlight the need to ensure that innovation must not be monopolized by those with power — power which, incidentally, is substantially a public gift.”