#4 Shiva Ayyadurai

Invention: Email

VA Shiva Ayyadurai was born 2 December 1963 in Mumbai, India. At age seven, he left with his family to live in the United States.  At the age of 14, he attended a special summer program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (NYU) to study computer programming, and it was the period, as he claims, led to invention of email.

It is quite heartening to mention that, Ayyadurai missed on the fame for some reason, even though he was just a 14 year old teenager when he invented email in 1978. He developed a full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system, which he called "EMAIL" and copyrighted in 1982. That name's resemblance to the generic term "email" and the claims he later made for the program have led to controversy over Ayyadurai's place in the history of computer technology.

In languages such as FORTRAN IV, it was conventional and a well-known fact that names of programs, variables and subroutines were typically written in upper case --- thus the convention of "EMAIL" to refer to the main subroutine name of the program V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai developed. By the source code submitted to the US Copyright Office and by the documents provided to the Smithsonian, email's intention and origin was to replicate electronically the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system. These are indisputable facts, as I have referred to in my earlier statement. Note by the Copyright Act of 1976, once a work is in publication it is protected. In 1978, "email" was first coined and used by Shiva to name his program.

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