RFCs 561, 680, 724, and 733 are the antecedents to RFC 822, which remains the basis of every nearly every email sent today. The dates on the earlier RFCs start from 1973, with RFC 733 (what I think was the first one actually agreed upon as a standard rather than a, well, request for comments) merely in 1977, all before the supposed "invention" in 1978. (RFC 822 itself was only 1982).
It's even hard to take the claim that Shiva's invention was the first to mimic inter-office mail seriously: all of the header fields are clearly mentioned in RFC 680.
In other words, the only way that you can even plausibly claim that Shiva invented email is to define email so narrowly that the only candidate is, in fact, his product. This should come across about as absurd as saying that FORTRAN can't be the first programming language because it didn't include an if statement.
Correct! It's also notable that his claims just barely stay out of legally actionable material by his insistence on differentiating email from EMAIL (in all caps), and his insistence that EMAIL is an "electronic version of an interoffice mail system". So he's the creator of software that he named "EMAIL", but not an inventor of anything. His claims are full of similar term redefinitions and self-aggrandizing language.
Despite his aggressive campaign to be recognized for something notable other than his participation in pseudoscience, marketing BS and corrupt government organizations, the rest of the world remains unconvinced. He had a single class he was teaching at MIT at the time all the media articles hit, in which he introcuded a new term that he used to aggressively market himself as an expert in an "emerging field". His various sites link between each other as proof of his excellence. This type of self-referential press is a specialty of his. He even directly edited his own Wikipedia article as part of his media campaign.
You'll note that the first paragraph ends in a sentence with a dozen "references". This is how his edits always look and the page was originally full of sentences with 5+ references, which made tracking down legitimate information quite difficult. It's undergone heavy editing since then, but he still drops in for edit wars.
There's a good chance that snake oil is involved if he's anywhere near a project.
Shiva is a dick if ever there was one...I overlapped with him at MIT and never met a more vain publicity seeking a$$hole. He was almost universally despised at MIT.
Sounds to me like they didn't actually get married. From his wikipedia article:
'Ayyadurai later said it was not "a formal wedding or marriage", but a celebration of their "friendship in a spiritual ceremony with close friends and her family.'
