V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who was awarded official recognition as the inventor of the computer program for email from the U.S. government 32 years ago, has slammed his critics for not giving him full credit, Indo-Asian News Service reported Monday.
Ayyadurai was only 14 years old when he developed the breakthrough technology. But now, he claims his modest background has prevented him from getting the recognition he deserved from people who are both economically and racially prejudiced, he told Huffington Post.
"The reality is this: in 1978, there was a 14-year-old boy, and he was the first to create electronic office system. He called it email, a term that had never been used before, and then he went on and got official recognition by the U.S. government," he told Huffington Post.
After studying at Livingston High School in New Jersey, Ayyadurai began his work on the email system for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
"In 1978, he developed a full-scale emulation of the inter-office mail system which he called 'E-mail' and copyrighted in 1982," according to IANS. "At that time, copyright was the equivalent of a patent as there was no other way to protect software inventions.
"Based on his work, Ayyadurai won a Westinghouse Science Talent Search Award for high school seniors in 1981."
However, some have challenged Ayyadurai's claims of being part of computer technology's history, saying they instead have invented email. But the inventor believes they are just afraid of upward mobility and change.
"[The discovery] wasn't done at MIT; it wasn't done at the military; it wasn't done at a big institution. It was done in Newark, N.J., one of the poorest cities in the United States. It was done by a dark-skinned immigrant kid, 14 years old," he added.
The official U.S. copyright notice for "E-mail" now lies with the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of American History.
Currently, Ayyadurai is behind seven businesses, including EchoMail - a $200 million company that has Nike and the U.S. Senate as customers.
