If you’re reading this, you’re online and, as such, you probably have
an email account. But have you ever wondered about the origins of
email? It’s not exactly a cut-and-dried case, as various forms of
electronic messaging have been around since the humble telegraph.
I had the opportunity to sit down with V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai,
who holds the first copyright for “EMAIL”—a system he began building in
1978 at just 14 years of age. It was modeled after the communication
system being used at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark,
New Jersey. His task: replicate the University’s traditional mail
system electronically.
And with that, email—as we currently know it—was born.
In 1981, Shiva took honors at the Westinghouse Science Awards for his
“High Reliability, Network-Wide, Electronic Mail System” and attended
MIT later that fall. The copyright for the term EMAIL was granted to
Shiva in 1982, after which he won a White House competition for
developing a system to automatically analyze and sort email messages.
That technology eventually became the basis for EchoMail, a service used by several large businesses.
Credit to: Doug Aamoth – Time Techland Magazine
