You never know when or who will have that spark of inspiration and change the world forever.
A then, 14-year-old boy had that spark, re-writing the history books bringing the way we communicate into the digital age back in the 1970s.
Shiva Ayyadurai was just a kid living in New Jersey, according to NBC Philadelphia, immgrating with his parents from India, the son of a mathematician mother and chemical engineer father.
In 1978, at the age of 14, he was given the task, while he was still in high school during the morning and working for a medical university in the afternoons, to come up with an electronic way staff for the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey to communicate, NBC Philadelphia reported.
While he did not have the initial idea for an electronic way to communicate, that came from a colleague, NBC Philadelphia reported, he did come up with framework and wrote the programming that turned into what we all use today.
He presented his invention, an electronic version of a memorandum, to 200 doctors, but many were skeptical. But the school went with the quicker, electronic version in 1978. Ayyadurai copyrighted the term and documentation on August 30, 1982, NBC Philadelphia reported.
Meanwhile controversy has surrounded the timeline of email events. Some people, including a billion-dollar defense company, don't agree with Ayyadurai's version of events.
According to an article on the Huffington Post, Ayyadurai's former co-worker Robert Field claims the company based their brand on their claim that they inveted email and has actually used their public relations push to discredit Ayyadurai's history.
Ayadurai, during an interview with the Huffington Post said that he was indeed the first to come up with the electronic office system, calling email, a term never used before, and that it was his background and the fact the coding did not come from either a univeristy like MIT or the military, as the reason he has not received the recognition he deserved.
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