My kind of legacy – Part II

All right, the first part of this article appeared gazillion years ago; or, on 15 July, 2013 to be specific, when I wrote about the passing away of Douglas Engelbart, the guy who invented the computer mouse in 1967. In another sad event, the inventor of the email, Raymond (Ray) Tomlinson, passed away on Saturday, […]

All right, the first part of this article appeared gazillion years ago; or, on 15 July, 2013 to be specific, when I wrote about the passing away of Douglas Engelbart, the guy who invented the computer mouse in 1967. In another sad event, the inventor of the email, Raymond (Ray) Tomlinson, passed away on Saturday, 5 March, 2016, from an apparent heart attack. He was 74 years old. Tomlinson invented email in 1971. If you have sent or received emails to or from another computer, you have enjoyed Tomlinson’s invention.
One consolation for bereaved people is the acknowledgement that everyone will eventually die; it is just a matter of time. Of course, the finality of death and the helplessness that the bereaved feel makes the event hit people very hard.
Different people leave different legacies when they pass on, whether they consciously design the legacies themselves or the legacies happen by default. Some people toil to be stinky rich, so they can leave the legacy of wealth behind. The wealth might have been obtained legitimately through hard work and fair play. Or, it might have been obtained via dubious, corrupt, means. For example, the last government in Nigeria is believed by many to have tipped the scale in the level of corruption, causing unnecessary suffering for the citizens of the country. The stubbornness of the problem caused by the corruption is manifested in the efforts now required of the current government to straighten the country’s finances. Of the two governments, it is not hard to figure out whose legacy to wish for.
The legacies that last may actually not have anything to do with how much money you leave behind. In many developed, western countries, you often hear very wealthy people giving their money away to charities while they are still alive; tasking their children and relations to figure out the ways to make a living on their own. The legacy of Steve Jobs is for the creation of cool gadgets, not the money he made in doing so. In fact, I hardly hear anyone talk about Steve Jobs’ financial legacy! His, Engelbart’s, and Tomlinson’s, are the kinds of legacy that we should wish for ourselves, children, and grandchildren.
Please, do not interpret the previous paragraph to mean that I am against massive wealth; far from it. In fact, I am actually in strong favour of financial abundance, so you can live a life of significance and also be able to help those in need. Moreover, you cannot build a mosque or a church with love alone. There has to be money, folks! And yes, money can help you build great legacies when you use it to do good for others and you have acquired it in a just manner.
Before Tomlinson’s invention, email messages could only be sent in the same server, not across servers. Though the invention was in 1971, it wasn’t until the personal computer arrived and democratized computing in the late 80s and early 90s that massive usage of email began. Earlier email applications include America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. According to some accounts by the Radicati Group, there were 3.9 billion email accounts in 2013, with up to 100 billion emails being sent and received per day by businesses alone in 2013.
Tomlinson was a native of Amsterdam in upstate New York, who graduated from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, and MIT in Boston, USA. He was working for Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN), a Boston company that was instrumental in the development of a very early version of the Internet, called ARPANET, when he decided to figure out a way for people to send messages across computers.
Tomlinson was also credited with the creation of the “@” sign in an email address. His rational for using the symbol: The fact that it was little-used at the time, so it reduced ambiguity, and, according to Tomlinson, “It’s the only preposition on the keyboard.”
Don’t be confused! If you google “inventor of email,” chances are the name Shiva Ayyadurai will pop up all over the place. The controversial Dr. Ayyadurai, a Mumbai, Indian-born U.S. inventor, claims that he was 14 years old when as a research fellow at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, USA, he invented email in 1978. Dr. Ayyadurai claims that all Tomlinson did was “experimenting with internal messaging in 1971; he just had an idea to send a text message between computers.” Dr. Ayyadurai argues that is not email – “since email, as we all know, is a system that includes features such as Inbox, Outbox, Drafts, Folders, Attachments, Carbon Copies, Groups, Forwarding, Reply, Delete, Archive, Sort, Bulk Distribution, and more”. Dr. Ayyadurai claims this full system was his invention. Most people do not agree with his claims, his copyrighting the phrase “EMAIL” in 1982 notwithstanding. Dr. Ayyadurai says that the inventor of the email is still alive!