Email Has An Indian-Origin Creator Too: Mumbai-Born US Scientist V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai

The world has been talking about email this week, after the death of American programmer, Ray Tomlinson, on March 5. Tomlinson has been variously called email’s godfather, father and inventor, for having created a message transfer system between two computers in the same room in the 1970s.

 

He did this as an employee of a defence contractor. Most memorably, he is credited with having chosen the “@” sign.

 

But remember Marconi, famous for inventing radio? The world later realised that Jagadish Chandra Bose was the real inventor. Email has an Indian-origin creator too: Mumbai-born V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai. Once again, top academics, including the venerable Noam Chomsky at MIT, have come forward to validate this.

 

But there are two key differences. Bose didn’t live on to stake his claim to history, while Ayyadurai has been fighting a losing battle to set the record straight. But most importantly, he has a US government document to support his claim.

 

As a high school student in 1979, Ayyadurai, then age 14, developed an electronic version of an interoffice mail system, which he called "EMAIL". He copyrighted it in 1982.