Two men are each called the inventor of email: one chose the @ sign between two computers in 1971, the other wrote a program he named EMAIL as a 14-year-old in 1978, and the fight over whose claim counts ended up in a federal courtroom

Most people who know the story of email know one name. The complication is that there are two, and which one a person lands on has less to do with the historical record than with a definition almost nobody stops to pin down.

Ask who invented email and the confident answer is usually Ray Tomlinson, the BBN engineer who in 1971 sent the first message between two computers on a network and picked the @ sign to sit between a user and a machine. Ask a different person and the equally confident answer is V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, who as a teenager in New Jersey wrote a program he called EMAIL and later registered a copyright for it. The two claims have been argued by computing historians, corrected in print by the Washington Post, contradicted in a formal statement by the Smithsonian, and fought over in a federal defamation suit. The disagreement is not really about who typed what. It is about what the word email is allowed to mean.

The network came first

To understand why the two claims describe different things, it helps to start before either of them. In October 1969, a UCLA graduate student named Charley Kline tried to log in to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute over ARPANET, the Pentagon-funded network that would grow into the internet. He got two letters in before the far end crashed. As PBS recounted, UCLA grad student Charley Kline had been trying to type “LOGIN,” but the system crashed, leaving LO as the first thing ever transmitted between two computers on the network.

ARPANET was not built to carry letters. It existed so that researchers could log in to expensive machines they did not have on site and borrow their computing power. Messaging between people came later, and it arrived in two very different shapes. That difference is the whole argument.

Tomlinson’s claim: a message that crossed a network

By 1971, Ray Tomlinson was an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman, the Cambridge firm building much of ARPANET’s plumbing. Programs already existed that let people leave notes for each other on a shared machine, the way colleagues in one building drop memos in each other’s pigeonholes. What did not exist was a way to reach someone on a different computer. Tomlinson combined a local messaging tool with a file-transfer program so a note could travel across the network, and he chose the @ sign to separate the recipient from the host. According to the Internet Hall of Fame, he developed ARPANET’s first application for network email by combining the SNDMSG and CPYNET programs, allowing messages to be sent to users on other computers.

That is the crux of Tomlinson’s claim. Not the first electronic message, which predated him by years, but the first one sent from a person on one networked machine to a person on another. It is the shape email has taken ever since: an address that names a person at a place.

Ayyadurai’s claim: a program named EMAIL

Seven years later, in New Jersey, a 14-year-old was building something genuinely impressive. V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai, a high-school student volunteering at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, wrote a large program to move the paperwork of an office mailroom onto a computer: inbox, outbox, drafts, folders, and memo fields for To, From, Subject and Cc. He named it EMAIL. Techdirt, one of his most persistent critics, does not dispute the accomplishment itself, noting that he built a functional email system for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) in Newark, New Jersey. In 1982, as an MIT undergraduate, he took the step that would become central to his case. As the Boston Globe reported, in 1982, he received federal copyright protection for the code he wrote for a program he called EMAIL.

Ayyadurai has argued, since going public with the claim in 2011, that this makes him the inventor of email, and that the copyright is the government’s recognition of that fact.

Why historians treat these as different claims

The objection from computing historians is not that Ayyadurai’s system was fake. It is that email, in the ordinary sense of electronic messages passing between people, was already in routine use years before a teenager in New Jersey wrote his program. Messaging on shared machines dated to the 1960s, and networked person-to-person mail was running across ARPANET through the 1970s. In February 2012, after news outlets repeated the invention claim, the Smithsonian issued a statement that exchanging messages through computer systems, what most people call “email,” predates the work of Ayyadurai. The Washington Post, which had run an early piece accepting the claim, later ran a correction on that coverage.

The position of critics such as Thomas Haigh, a historian of information technology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is that a person cannot invent something already in widespread use. Ayyadurai’s counter is to define email narrowly, as the full electronic replica of an interoffice paper mail system with every feature bundled into one program, and to argue that nothing before his EMAIL met that definition. His critics see the narrow definition as circular, drawn precisely so that only his program can satisfy it.

The argument that went to court

What sets this dispute apart from the usual squabbles over scientific credit is that it was litigated. Ayyadurai sued the technology blog Techdirt for defamation after it called his claim false, seeking millions in damages. In 2017 a federal judge threw the case out. As The Register reported, a US district judge has dismissed the libel lawsuit entrepreneur Shiva Ayyadurai filed against bloggers who rubbished his claims he invented email. The judge did not rule on who invented email. He ruled that because the meaning of the word was genuinely contested, the blog’s criticism could not be proven false, and so it was protected speech.

That ruling is a neat summary of the whole affair. The suit failed not because a court settled the history, but because the court found the central term too ambiguous to pin down. The ambiguity that made the criticism legally safe is the same ambiguity the entire dispute runs on.

What the fight is actually about

Strip away the lawsuits and the press corrections and the two claims stop competing, because they answer different questions. Tomlinson’s belongs to the history of networks: the first time a message left one machine and arrived at another, addressed to a specific person at a specific place. Ayyadurai’s belongs to the history of software features: an early, ambitious attempt to package the full furniture of office mail into a single program. Both things happened. Both were real.

“Invention” is the word that cannot hold both of them at once, because it implies a single origin point, and email does not have one. It has a long tail of people who each added a piece: the researchers leaving messages on shared mainframes in the 1960s, the engineer who sent one across a network in 1971, the programmers who copied his address syntax, the teenager who rebuilt the office mailroom in code, the committees who standardised the protocols in the 1980s. The story is less a lightning strike than a relay.

Which is why the honest answer to who invented email is a question in return: which part do you mean? The @ sign in every address bar points to Tomlinson. The word EMAIL, capitalised and copyrighted, points to Ayyadurai. And the thing itself, the ordinary act of typing to someone who is not in the room, points to no one and everyone, which is usually how the most useful inventions turn out.