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Happy Birthday Email
An Indian American had the brain to invent electronic mail without which we cannot figure out a single day in this era.
30 August, email turned 32. Now we wonder how this fast and quick method of message transfer came into existence. The credit goes to an Indian American, Shiva Ayyadurai. Shiva developed a full-scale software of the interoffice mail system and it was named email.
He was officially acknowledged as the inventor of the computer programme on 30 August, 1982, by the US government. Born to Tamil family in Bombay, Shiva was just 14 years old when he invented the email system. He was studying at Livingston High School in New Jersey and he began working on this system for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. A copyright was given to the email system as no other way was known to protect software inventions at that time.
Ayyadurai got the idea of the email system from the way mail was transported internally in offices. He tried to make a copy of ‘Pneumatic Tube System’ which was mostly used to send interoffice mails across offices. This system used a physical network of tubes which used to transport typed mails to secretaries. Each secretary used to have inbox, outbox, drafts, carbon copy paper, folders, address book, paper clips or attachments etc. All these were used to create and process incoming and outgoing mails.
Shiva also took a note of the common templates like “To”, “From”, “Subject”, “Date”, “Body”, “CC”, “BCC” and so on. All these templates were incorporated in the version of the electronic mail too. Mail was written FORTRAN programming language and Shiva discovered an electronic version of the same. Shiva received many accolades for his extraordinary work and also won a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Award for high school seniors in 1981. Now Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History (SINMAH) has the official US copyright for “Email”. But there is a controversy that not Ayyadurai but some other people have invented email.
via: http://www.efytimes.com/e1/fullnews.asp?edid=147170