Actress Fran Drescher known for her TV show The Nanny, which she created with her first husband Peter Marc Jacobson, got remarried this weekend. Drescher tied the knot with Shiva Ayyadurai, 50, who claims to be one of the inventors of email.
As a 14-year-old in the late 1970s, Ayyadurai copyrighted “an electronic interoffice message system he dubbed ‘EMAIL.’” Even though his famous undergraduate professor at MIT, Noam Chomsky, backed him up, not everyone believes Ayyadurai deserves credit for inventing email as we know it. The latter group of doubters includes Marc Weber, the founding curator of the Computer History Museum, who said of Ayyadurai: “I would not be surprised if, as a brilliant and motivated 14-year-old…he unknowingly reinvented many of the features of e-mail which had come before.”
