Shiva is smart, but he doesn't even claim to have invented the internet. The one thing I do not like about him is his claim to have invented EMAIL in 1978, when he was 14. He did not. The ARPANET was invented in 1969 (not by Shiva or by Al Gore), and email was well established in 1973 when I first used it, at Caltech and MIT. What Shiva invented was a specific email system -- called EMAIL in all caps -- and he copyrighted the software code for his email system, not the term "email" itself.
thanks very much for sorting that out I had no idea.
I worked as a sysop and sysprog on the PLATO system that was mostly developed on the University of Illinois campus.
PLATO’s email system was already well developed when I came on board, roughly in 1973 as a student. Sysprog Ray Ozzie, later of Lotus Notes and Microsoft fame, the first $2B man, did a good bit of the thinking and most of the implementation of PLATO’s mail system.
On PLATO, there were personal notes (’pnotes’) and group notes (’gnotes’). Gnotes were like bulletin boards where various types of access restrictions were possible. Pnotes were a lot like current email on one’s internet mail login. It was usually more directly related to what today would be understood as one’s ‘internet provider’ rather than something as loose hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc.
Shiva definitely came into a well-developed email field by 1978 and would have had to have blinders on not to be aware of those other places where email had already been developed. More likely: he “borrowed” from others and called it his own.