Who is Shiva Ayyadurai?

Answer 1

He has claimed to be the inventor of email. He was born in Tamil Nadu, India. At the age of 7 he was migrated to US. At the age of 14 as a high school student he developed a system that he called EMAIL. It contained the elements of an email that we are used to seeing today such as sender, recipient, copy addresses, subject and text body as well as a word processor to construct the message.

However, other IT historians and academics claim that all of the elements of his EMAIL system were present in earlier messaging systems and that Ayyadurai in fact, did not write code for any new or novel function or device within Email technology. In support of this view, Ray Tomlinson is credited with producing the first messaging system to allow electronic messages to be sent between users across the ARPANET network with the now common @ character between a user name and the host name.

Although the claims surrounding Shiva Ayyadurai will generate controversy for years to come, it is nonetheless impressive that a 14 year old managed to produce a complete email system, whether or not he was the first to do so.