Who Invented Email? Just Ask…Noam Chomsky

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/noam-chomsky-email

by wpinbacker • 14 years ago

36 29 14 years ago

wired.com

ilamont• 14 years ago

Slashdot discussion:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-e...

PaulHoule• 14 years ago

Now, this is exactly what's so crazy about patents.

Something like email doesn't get 'invented' by one person, it's the kind of thing that multiple people will arrive at through different paths at about the same time.

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

Chomsky arguing semantics. He's a linguist, he has his hobbies. Why do the rest of us care?

This link is quite relevant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...

sashahart7• 14 years ago

Chomsky is being a polemicist, which has always been his greatest skill.

He has been off on politics rather than linguistics for some time now. E.g. check out http://www.chomsky.info/articles.htm (this is a similar pattern to many old scientists)

spinebless• 14 years ago

lolwhat? you're not fit to tie his shoe laces. but then again, weak ad-hominems are a pattern to those who aren't, and/or are admiring the clothes of naked emperors, right?

"old scientist" -- chomsky got dragged into this by paying attention ever since the vietnam war, when not many people did. you irresponsible, ungrateful little fuck! (mod that down, ban me -- it's worth saying something that actually matters)

why-el• 14 years ago

I don't know what you mean by old, but Chomsky has been an activist for over 40 years now.

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

I'm aware of Chomsky's political proclivities, but this is purely a debate over the definition of "email". The nature of the actual systems invented is not in dispute, merely what to call them.

dalke3• 14 years ago

Your "many old scientists" parenthetical comment neglects several strong biases. You've likely never heard of most of the old scientists who don't get into politics because you don't know about their work at all. Older people tend to be more interested in politics than younger. It's hard to be trained/have experience in one field and then switch to another, so few young scientists would also be known for their politics. (For example, Margaret Thatcher's research chemistry impact is much less well known than her political impact.)

And yet, Chomsky is one of those few, having become one of the leading opponents to the Vietnam War while in his late 30s - as your link itself implies - and so doesn't fall under the premise of your comment.

dkarl2• 14 years ago

Chomsky is interested in power, not semantics. The question "Who invented email?" has a variety of possible meanings, and if you clarify what you mean, the answer follows from the facts. But people don't care what the question means; they care about the prestige attached to the answer. This is more true of Chomsky than of the average person because of his obsession with power. He knows it is an attention-getting question, and he wants to answer it in favor of a powerless underdog who was robbed of his just deserts by well-connected "insiders," because he wants people to see that story everywhere. Therefore Chomsky runs with a particular interpretation of the question and disingenuously says, "The facts are indisputable," when he knows that the facts are the least issue in the dispute.

Chomsky is as much a rhetorician and an entertainer as anyone on the right, though his intelligence and love of underdogs make him a lot more likable than someone like Rush Limbaugh.

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

This is a very interesting (and plausible) theory about Chomsky's motivations. But again - it's irrelevant to us.

We know who invented which software package and what functionality each one had. The rest is a debate over variable names.

calibraxis• 14 years ago

Some of the comments here are very strange. Chomsky worked in MIT's electronics lab, because MIT didn't have a linguistics department before he came along, and the government was throwing all sorts of money around to build the high tech industry. I imagine it was rather chaotic and exciting.

So Chomsky probably knows what he's talking about. This is about his work life, not his participation in political life.

sashahart7• 14 years ago

Chomsky isn't going to get a lot of power from anything at this point, he hit his stride politically some time ago. If you have read Chomsky's work from early academic stuff up through today, one unifying characteristic is that he is very good at polemics and very apt to it. That style is so much a part of him that it is completely unsurprising that he would use it even on something apparently strange like the invention of email. It's just a long term character trait.

6ren• 14 years ago

We complain that there's nothing new, and here someone's electronic messaging system is being claimed to have been new because it was a reinvention. No one can argue with its success.

Perhaps there's a lesson here, that the best innovations are adapting systems that already work to new contexts. Invention from scratch is hard to get right (and hard to adopt).

DanielBMarkham3• 14 years ago

I'm flagging this, although I have mixed feelings about doing it. I think it might be fine as a blog article, but from Wired it just looks too much like pandering.

Sounds too much like "<PROVOCATIVE NERD-BAIT QUESTION X> Commented on by <FAMOUS UNRELATED PERSON WHO IS ALSO PROVOCATIVE>" It's just too easy to kick out dozens of these things.

Since it's the weekend, here's a few samples to show you what I mean (all of this is made up, of course)

"Functional Programming Not Worth Learning Says Al Gore"

"Paul Krugman Discloses His Favorite Unix Editor"

"Bush Reveals His Opinion on Advanced SEO Techniques"

"Lunar Colony Better Than Mars Mission: Michael Moore"

"James Cameron on Why Higgs Boson is Important"

You could do this all day. Lots of fluff and food for chitchat, nothing much useful.

KC8ZKF• 14 years ago

Except that Chomsky is not completely unrelated, as your examples are. Ayyadurai is a colleague of Chomsky. Ayyadurai was a student of Chomsky close to to the time in question. Ayyadurai's claim centers around the semantics of the term "email", an area of expertise for Chomsky.

DanielBMarkham3• 14 years ago

I usually don't deep-dive into threads, but I think my comment about flagging and your reply deserves an explanation.

Take a look at the comments on this article. Most of them are about Chomsky as a provocative person and how it relates to the question of email origins, not the issue itself. Famous-Provocative-Person-X wades into any discussion and suddenly we're off into the weeds. That's true whether you can draw a link or not. The issue of a link is irrelevant, at least as far as I can tell so far from the comments. (I'd argue that any _real_ story, as opposed to the made up ones I invented, would have some kind of link like this. Otherwise the game would just be too obvious)

The point being I flag things that generate lots of off-topic, emotionally-laden comment-noise. I might have gotten a little flag-happy with this article. Don't know. Been wrong lots of times before. Quite honestly I grow tired of seeing any famous person or brand name on HN. It's almost always an indication of time-wasting nonsense ahead.

logjam2• 14 years ago

Confusing.

"Pandering"? What possible definition of "pandering" are you using? This is an article about the origins of a technical communications medium, origins which apparently have some relation to semantics, commented on by the most eminent linguist I know of.

And since you're being all meta here and everything, and since you took the time to influence what's on the front page in this case, it's curious you apparently had no problem with yesterday's front page post which contained pertinent hacker news like...wait for it....the letter from divorced Ronald Reagan advising his son on marriage - a post you commented in and happened to take the time to include an Amazon affiliate link in.

yummyfajitas4• 14 years ago

...origins which apparently have some relation to semantics...

No, the origins have nothing to do with semantics. The debate over who invented "email" is dependent on the definition of the word "email". If you define email in certain ways, Van Vleck's 1961 system was the first email system. By Chomsky's definition, Van Vleck's 1961 invention doesn't qualify as email, but Ayyaduri's does.

abalone• 14 years ago

What are you talking about? If all of a sudden there was a campaign to defame Vint Cerf through namecalling and slander, would that be "fluff" and "chitchat" for HN?

Chomsky is an qualified participant in this debate, unlike the examples you gave. He has published works on media analysis and the mechanisms by which facts are overpowered by propaganda. That is exactly the issue at stake here. Standing up for truth and rigorous investigation in the face of media pressure. That's why he is involved in this.. It's the kind of thing he's fought for his whole life.

Who Invented Email? Just Ask…Noam Chomsky

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