Not to take anything away from his legacy, but isn't it a stretch to talk about the "invention" of email when we had telex, telegrams, heliography, scrolls of vellum carried by Roman messenger, and so on? What's left to invent?
It's not a stretch at all, it's true that he invented that particular technology. Nobody said he invented the idea of passing a message from one place/person to another.
I'm not sure why you are being downvoted because this is a very legitimate question. Fortunately it's not hard to see that email, and Tomlinson's contributions, were incredibly novel and have shaped a lot of "good parts" of the internet today.
Although obviously email was conceptually based on a very old notion of communication, embodied, as you point out, by many media that came before it, it had to solve a few small, specific problems inherent in moving messages from one system to another via a simple network protocol.
The use of the "user@___domain" notion of identity seems mundane today, but in some important ways it was a huge breakthrough in the way that people thought about humans and the systems that need to work in order for them to be contacted.
What constitutes a novel invention is a matter of open dispute. I strongly recommend W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology, which addresses this, and other questions on, well, the nature of technology.
RFCs 561, 680, 724, and 733 are the antecedents to RFC 822, which remains the basis of every nearly every email sent today. The dates on the earlier RFCs start from 1973, with RFC 733 (what I think was the first one actually agreed upon as a standard rather than a, well, request for comments) merely in 1977, all before the supposed "invention" in 1978. (RFC 822 itself was only 1982).
It's even hard to take the claim that Shiva's invention was the first to mimic inter-office mail seriously: all of the header fields are clearly mentioned in RFC 680.
In other words, the only way that you can even plausibly claim that Shiva invented email is to define email so narrowly that the only candidate is, in fact, his product. This should come across about as absurd as saying that FORTRAN can't be the first programming language because it didn't include an if statement.
Correct! It's also notable that his claims just barely stay out of legally actionable material by his insistence on differentiating email from EMAIL (in all caps), and his insistence that EMAIL is an "electronic version of an interoffice mail system". So he's the creator of software that he named "EMAIL", but not an inventor of anything. His claims are full of similar term redefinitions and self-aggrandizing language.
Despite his aggressive campaign to be recognized for something notable other than his participation in pseudoscience, marketing BS and corrupt government organizations, the rest of the world remains unconvinced. He had a single class he was teaching at MIT at the time all the media articles hit, in which he introcuded a new term that he used to aggressively market himself as an expert in an "emerging field". His various sites link between each other as proof of his excellence. This type of self-referential press is a specialty of his. He even directly edited his own Wikipedia article as part of his media campaign.
You'll note that the first paragraph ends in a sentence with a dozen "references". This is how his edits always look and the page was originally full of sentences with 5+ references, which made tracking down legitimate information quite difficult. It's undergone heavy editing since then, but he still drops in for edit wars.
There's a good chance that snake oil is involved if he's anywhere near a project.
Shiva is a dick if ever there was one...I overlapped with him at MIT and never met a more vain publicity seeking a$$hole. He was almost universally despised at MIT.
Sounds to me like they didn't actually get married. From his wikipedia article:
'Ayyadurai later said it was not "a formal wedding or marriage", but a celebration of their "friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends and her family.'
an invention does not need to be a completely new concept. A car was invented even after people were able to get from point A to point B via many means. Yet the car is still a big leap forward. Email seems obvious to you now, but at one point there were many obstacles to overcome to make it work.
