On August 30, 2014, email turned 32 years. The method of message transfer was invented by Indian American V.A.Shiva Ayyadurai when he was just 14 years. V A Shiva Ayyadurai was born to a Tamil Family in Bombay in 1963.
In 1978, Shiva Ayyadurai invented a computer programme, which he called “email,” that simulated all the functions of the interoffice mail system: Inbox, Outbox, Folders, Memo, Attachments, Address Book, etc. These features are now well-known parts of every email arrangement.
On August 30, 1982, the US government formally recognized Shiva Ayyadurai as the inventor of email by awarding him the first US Copyright for Email for his 1978 invention. At that time copyright was the only way to safeguard software inventions.
The Email wasn’t invented, with a huge research budget, in big institutions like the ARPANET, MIT, etc. Rather these organizations had believed it “impossible” to build such a system, considering it far too complex.
At the age of 14, Shiva Ayyadurai worked at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) as a research fellow, where Dr Leslie Michelson, then Director of the Laboratory Computer Network (LCN) at UMDNJ gave him a challenge: to transform the old system of paper-based mail communications used at UMDNJ to an electronic one.
Shiva Ayyadurai created a computer programme of over 50,000 lines of code, which electronically simulated all the qualities of the interoffice mail system.
