E-Mail, Vaccination, Senate Candidate, #FireFauci, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Hillary Clinton, and Fran Drescher

Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai—longshot Senate candidate, self-described inventor of e-mail, apparent hero of some #FireFauci folks, and former husband of Fran Drescher—is suing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over claims related to the "health freedom movement" and vaccinations. You can read the Complaint, observe the links to Clinton, and see for yourself whether this is a confluence of the signs of the Apocalypse all coming together ….

(To be precise, Drescher has no actual involvement in the Complaint, simply having been married to Ayyadurai [UPDATE: "informally," it turns out] from 2014 to 2016; and yet consider the Seven Seals possibility.)

UPDATE: Apropos Dr. Ayyadurai's resentment at not being recognized as the inventor of e-mail, here's a recent quote from him: "The bottom line is: Maybe if I was blond-haired, blue-eyed, and my name was Eisenstein, or Rosenstein, I'd be on every fricking stamp in the world."

Comments

[DRM]

Incidentally, if you want to honor Indian who actually developed a critical bit of network software, go look up Abhay Bhushan, primary creator of FTP. He also had quite a bit to actually do with the actual evolution of modern email systems.

[Beldar]

This is what Fed. R. Civ. P. 11 is for. I hope it's invoked here.

[Will Nonya]

The guy who claimed to invent email wants to be on stamps...

[santamonica811]

I'm so glad I was not the only one who noted that irony. I actually chuckled out loud when I read his quote.

[James Pollock]

I bet the people who invent cryptocurrency wouldn't mind receiving little bits of paper with dead Presidents' faces printed on them.

[Dr. Ed]

I'll give him credit -- 3 years ago, he went into harm's way in what would make what happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge look look like a Sunday School Picnic. See: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/08/19/gop_senate_candidate_shiva_ayyadurais_speech_at_boston_free_speech_rally.html

I don't know what he is suing about this time, but this is Massachusetts where nothing is what it appears to be.

[bernard11]

he went into harm’s way in what would make what happened on the Edmund Pettus Bridge look look like a Sunday School Picnic.

You are fucking insane, not to mention an ignorant moron.

What are you a doctor of, exactly?

Your presence here is destructive.

[neurodoc]

@bernard11: "What are you a doctor of, exactly?"

Good luck in getting an answer from "Dr." Ed. That's not a question he entertains. (He claims a PhD in whatever from wherever.)

[Dr. Ed]

"the free speechers were escorted off the podium about 50 minutes after their event began. The Boston Police whisked them away in waiting police vans. Riot police had to be deployed to ensure their safety from a crowd in which many sought confrontation. "

See: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2017/08/21/free-speech-banned-boston-common-citys-ignominious-failure -- and look at who wrote it....

[Absaroka]

IBM had an email system by 1974 (and maybe earlier). I know because I used it :-).

[Dr. Ed]

Define "email." In 1974, it probably was uucp if even that.
Messages to fellow users on the same system is one thing -- email is sending them to users on *other* systems. I don't *think* that use of tcp/ip protocol dates back to 1974 but I may be wrong.

Of course, we all know that Al Gore invented the internet. And paper clips as well... 🙂

[regexp]

but I may be wrong.

UUCP didn't exist until 1979. IBM (and others) had proprietary connected systems and the ability to send messages to other users since the early 1960s. The first acknowledged e-mail was sent in 1971 across the predecessor of today's internet: ARPANET

Which brings us to Gore. Gore never said "he invented the internet". But he was a strong proponent of legislation that funded ARPANET. Without ARPANET the modern internet simply would not exist. At least not in the form that we know it today. Unlike you and most commenters here - he believes in science and technology and recognized the need to invest it in. If you were in charge - we would still be communicating with carrier pigeons.

[Dr. Ed]

Yes, but what was (is) DARPA?

Hint: DARPA used to be called ARPA....

[MatthewSlyfield]

Defense
Advanced
Research
Projects
Agency

[Dr. Ed]

It was the "D" that I was trying to emphasize -- the internet was developed by the military to serve as a means of communication after a nuclear war, and was initially funded out of the Defense budget.

Senator Gore never struck me as a hawk, and we all know what the Clinton/Gore administration did to the Defense budget.

[James Pollock]

Arpanet was proof-of-concept for packet-switching, a fundamental change in the way networked connections work. Packet-switching is more responsive to change than is circuit-switching, which is how ordinary long-distance phone calls work.

[MatthewSlyfield]

You are correct about what Arpanet was. Dr Ed is correct about WHY DARPA was funding the effort.

[James Pollock]

Duh.

[DRM]

Perhaps we should look at what he actually said? He said, quite explicitly, "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." Which is simply wrong, as a matter of ordinary English usage.

Consider if Gordon T. Stulberg had come out in the mid-1990s and said, "While at Twentieth Century Fox, I took the initiative in creating the Star Wars Universe". Does anybody doubt he would have been mocked for the claim? Sure, he was the guy who decided to fund Lucas's Star Wars film, but his was not the initiative and he did not do the creating. He's just the guy who went ahead and decided to spend other people's money on it.

It was only because people wanted to elect Gore President that they twisted themselves and the language all into pretzels, pretending that "took the initiative in creating" is somehow a closer paraphrase of "pushed funding for" than of "invented".

[Dan Schiavetta]

“I took the lead in creating the internet.” A true statement.

[James Pollock]

There's way more to it than political critics generally care to understand. The modern Internet as a business tool was largely i possible under the terms of most Internet-precursor networks, which explicitly prohibited commercial traffic of any kind. It was great for academics who needed to connect with each other to share information, but utterly unfit for creation of wealth. Treating the build-out of modern Internet infrastructure as a driver of wealth-creation was actually new in the 1990's and not one the academics who were actually using the Internet at the time valued or respected. Mr. Gore made some big promises of his vision of the "information superhighway", and we were not at all sure his foresight was accurate. Some of our criticisms of that vision were and are are quite accurate.

[Dan Schiavetta]

"Information superhighway" was the phrase President Clinton used.
You have to go back a few more years to see what Gore did (as a senator) to bring the internet into being.

[James Pollock]

"“Information superhighway” was the phrase President Clinton used."

No shit, really? Was he associated in some way with Mr. Gore?

[Dan Schiavetta]

I bet you regret posting that.

[James Pollock]

You lose.

[Dr. Ed]

"The modern Internet as a business tool was largely impossible under the terms of most Internet-precursor networks, which explicitly prohibited commercial traffic of any kind"

Ummm, didn't the DoD create the .com domain explicitly for that purpose -- in 1984? See: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc920#page-2

[James Pollock]

"didn’t the DoD create the .com domain explicitly for that purpose"

Umm, no, they did not. Businesses have been connected to the Internet literally since the beginning of the Arpanet. Which has nothing to do with whether the networks allowed commercial activity on them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_Internet_eXchange

[Krayt]

He did say when discussing the funding, "So in a sense, I helped invent the Internet." You can go watch it.

Government throwing money at stuff isn't invention in the normal use of the word. That's reserved to the bright ones who do the heavy lifting.

[James Pollock]

Ideas are cheap. Actually finding the money to get something done is an actual accomplishment. Business people who convince VCs to invest in their idea(s) get credit for founding the resultant company, even if their idea is to invest in someone else's invention. Edison hired a bunch of other people to invent things for his company, and gets credit for building the "house of ideas" the resulted.

[Absaroka]

"Define “email.”"

Something where you send messages to other users with content, headers like 'To', 'From', 'Subject', 'CC', 'BCC', and so on. Which the users at the time referred to as 'sending email'.

" use of tcp/ip protocol "

What would TCP/IP have to do with other, earlier networking protocols?

[James Pollock]

SMTP uses TCP and IP for routing, not other, earlier networking protocols. TCP/IP is scalable in a way that NetBIOS is not.

[Absaroka]

1)SMTP, like anything else at its level, doesn't give a hoot about what is under it in the protocol stack.

2)The SMTP RFC came out in 1982 and ... wait for it ... the email systems prior to that didn't use SMTP.

[James Pollock]

"The SMTP RFC came out in 1982 and … wait for it … the email systems prior to that didn’t use SMTP."

They were also incompatible with each other. and thus were not "Internet email".

[Absaroka]

Did you see the part from the links provided in the OP, discussing Ayyadurai 's claim to have invented email that said:

"In 1980 he created a small-scale electronic mail system used within University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, but this could not send messages outside the university ..."

So he's not claiming to have invented one particular flavor of email that used one particular WAN protocol; he's claiming to have invented email in general. So it would be a little silly to not consider prior email systems that used other worldwide WANs, even if they weren't your favorite WAN.

I'd drink every time you posted a random non-sequitur, but my poor liver...

[James Pollock]

"I’d drink every time you posted a random non-sequitur, but my poor liver"

It'd be better for you than whatever drugs you're using now.

[James Pollock]

IBM pushed NetBIOS. That's why Microsoft used it in their early networking products. They didn't switch to be primarily TCP/IP until Windows NT 4.0.

[Absaroka]

It must be National Non-sequitur Day or something. The era being discussed is pre-personal computer, pre-Microsoft, pre-NetBios, etc.

Think mainframes, complete with card[1] readers.

Harrumph ... kids these days 🙂

[1]as in Hollerith, not microSD 🙂

[James Pollock]

Dingleberry, NetBIOS is mainframe tech.
Hmmf Idiots these days.

[Absaroka]

From the wiki page: "NetBIOS was developed in 1983 by Sytek Inc. as an API for software communication over IBM PC Network LAN technology."

So the email system referenced above by "IBM had an email system by 1974 (and maybe earlier)" wasn't using it.

[James Pollock]

IBM PC networks were connected to mainframes via Token Ring, at a blistering 4Mb/sec, back in the 80's. People still thought IBM was leading the industry. As noted above, that's why Microsoft's early networked products were designed for NetBIOS. Though not with card readers. They were still partnering with IBM to make tomorrow's operating system today. The problem they had was that nobody had tomorrow's hardware yet, and the stuff they had couldn't run tomorrow's operating system yet.

[Absaroka]

"IBM PC networks were connected to mainframes via Token Ring, at a blistering 4Mb/sec, back in the 80’s."

Sure, I ran some of those systems back then. The token ring connectors were really spiffy. But this thread was about a guy who claimed he invented email in the 1978/1980 time frame. I was familiar, from having used it, of one dating to 1974 and earlier as a counter example to his claim. And I'm trying to grok why that has spawned a free association game of random 1980's computer trivia. I mean, I could start posting random facts about the PL/1 compiler, or how you programmed IBM 3705 communications controllers, but it doesn't really seem topical.

[James Pollock]

"this thread was about a guy who claimed he invented email in the 1978/1980 time frame."

Not all messaging systems are/were really "email"? In particular the ability to route between different systems and networks is a key characteristic. So postal mailing a magnetic tape is "electronic mail" and was available in 1974, but doesn't really settle the question of whether or not this dude had anything to do with creating "email" as the term is used today. Neither does your claim.

[Absaroka]

Unfortunately, your personal idiosyncratic definition isn't the one in general use.

[James Pollock]

"Unfortunately, your personal idiosyncratic definition isn’t the one in general use."

Presumably, you're under the misimpression that yours is.

[Absaroka]

I don't have a personal definition. I just use the one that is in general use. In the 1970's, before SMTP existed, people called things that you send messages to other people with 'Subject', 'To', 'From', 'CC' and so on 'email'. That was just the way it was.

And it still is. For example, people call what Protonmail does 'email', and it isn't sending SMTP email across heterogenous platforms. Similarly, lots of brokers and banks have something they call 'secure email', which means messages to/from you that are all done on their platform. You can rail on that that isn't what you consider to be 'email', and that's fine. It's just that the rest of the world disagrees with you.

[James Pollock]

FidoNet had inter-system echomail back in the 80's.

[Leo Marvin]

If I was on every fricking stamp in the world, I would be blond-haired, blue-eyed, and my name would be Eisenstein or Rosenstein.

Prove me wrong.

[James Pollock]

I am blond-haired and blue-eyed and neither has resulted in my being on a stamp, either under my own name or any other.

[neurodoc]

@Leo Marvin: Forget about stamps. Have you stopped responding to e-mail?

[Leo Marvin]

No, I just socially distanced my inbox. Did you send me something?

[neurodoc]

@Leo Marvin Yes, I have tried to reach you. Was going to search 3.5 year old email for your contact info.

[neurodoc]

@Leo Marvin Yes, I have tried to reach you. Was going to search 3.5 year old email for your contact info.