<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">Back to the original topic, one of the editors at BoingBoing.net just tweeted he still liked his year-ago post "Why I hate email" featuring a (supposedly) c.1977 Honewell advert that leads with<br> "Electronic Mail is a term that's been bandied about data processing circles for years."<br></div>​​<a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/08/10/why-i-hate-email.html">http://boingboing.net/2014/08/10/why-i-hate-email.html</a><br><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">​for which he cited as source a page only available now as<br> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140305112636/http://www.retronaut.com/2014/02/heck-electronic-mail/">https://web.archive.org/web/20140305112636/http://www.retronaut.com/2014/02/heck-electronic-mail/</a> <br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">​which slugs it as «1977: “What the Heck is Electronic Mail?”»​</div><br><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">An amusing April 1 article is the earliest found in <a href="http://books.google.com">books.google.com</a> from Computerworld (aside from an OCR false positive)<cite class="_Rm"></cite>​ 3/30/1981 p.66 forecasting a federal trial grinding along in 4/1/1999 pitting US vs  UT&T and MCM regarding monopolization of email. Pretty funny. <br><br><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif">books.google must have a vast number of OCR false positives, as Ngram finds 'email' in the 19th century. "e-mail" inflects from background radiation of false positives in the 1973-1975 period and flys 1976 forward.<br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:georgia,serif"><a href="https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=e-mail%2C%22electronic+mail%22%2Cemail&year_start=1960&year_end=1980&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20mail%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C%22%20electronic%20mail%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cemail%3B%2Cc0">https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=e-mail%2C%22electronic+mail%22%2Cemail&year_start=1960&year_end=1980&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ce%20-%20mail%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2C%22%20electronic%20mail%20%22%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cemail%3B%2Cc0</a><br></div></div>