The Huffington Post is attempting to rewrite the history of email. Even though email was in use for over a decade before the supposed inventor supposedly invented it, the Huff Post claims otherwise. (I recall first using email while in grad school back in the mid to early 1970s. Yes, we called it email and essentially it was the same then as it is now.) The truth is that the guy in the article just wrote a program that he named EMAIL, but the term email was in use long before he wrote his little program, which, BTW, contained nothing original. It was impressive that a kid his age (14 at the time) was able to basically code such a complex program, but there was nothing truly original about the software he wrote.
Why Is Huffington Post Running A Multi-Part Series To Promote The Lies Of A Guy Who Pretended To Invent Email?
There was a messaging system called MAILBOX at MIT in 1965. You can read all the details of it here, including source code. Ray Tomlinson is frequently credited with inventing the modern concept of email for the internet by establishing the @ symbol (in 1972) as a way of determining both the user and which computer to send the email to. By 1975, there were things like email folders (invented by Larry Roberts) and some other basic email apps. As is noted, by 1976 -- two years before Ayyadurai wrote his app -- email was 75% of all ARPANET traffic.
As noted in a comment left to the TechDirt article:
Actually, he didn't invent cc, bcc, etc either:
optional-field =
"To" ":" #address
/ "cc" ":" #address
/ "bcc" ":" #address ; Blind carbon
/ "Subject" ":" *text
/ "Comments" ":" *text
/ "Message-ID" ":" mach-id ; Only one allowed
/ "In-Reply-To"":" #(phrase / mach-id)
/ "References" ":" #(phrase / mach-id)
/ "Keywords" ":" #phrase
/ extension-field ; To be defined in
; supplemental
; specifications
/ user-defined-field ; Must have unique
; field-name & may
; be pre-empted
RFC: 733 dated 21 November 1977
Even bcc and cc weren't original ideas as they were in use before the program named EMAIL was released. An RFC is a set of standards developed by computer scientists/engineers, most often reflecting practices that have developed over months and years.
LINK: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140901/07280928386/huffpo-publishes-bizarre-misleading-factually-incorrect-multi-part-series-pretending-guy-invented-email-even-though-he-didnt.shtml