[ih] Invention of term 'email'

Nigel Roberts nigel at channelisles.net
Wed Jun 13 15:08:02 PDT 2012


That's basically the right approach.

I basically remember sending my first email, which was to Don Woods 
(DON at SU-AI) begging for a copy of the FORTRAN source to ADVENT around 
1977 or 1978 (He said no!).

But I don't remember it being called email.

In 1980, working on VAXes and PDP-11s it was called simply 'Mail'.
(VAXmail, or MAIL-11).

I'm not even sure whether ALL-IN-1 ever referred to it as 'email' (My 
recollection is that the menu said something overly verbose like

			"Electronic Mail"

but that may be just my viewing it through rose tinted glasses (The 
whole point about ALL-IN-1 was it was overly verbose!!).



N.



On 13/06/12 22:32, Dave Crocker wrote:
> For reference, the word 'invented' is getting bandied about quite a bit
> on this email history topic. For the moment, I suggest ignoring its use
> and worrying more about the specific thing being asked.
>
> When did the term 'email' first get used? So far, we have no solid data.
>
> We have very early use of terms like "electronic mail" and "electronic
> messaging" but not of the contraction.
>
> d/
>
> On 6/13/2012 1:47 PM, SM wrote:
>> Hi Noel,
>> At 12:21 13-06-2012, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>> where Chomsky is saying a student of his invented the term 'email' in
>>> 1978. Dunno if this is accurate, but FWIW I checked my collection of
>>> IENs and
>>
>> There was a discussion about the "invention" a few months ago ( see
>> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-smtp/current/msg00152.html ).
>> The discussion ended at
>> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-smtp/current/msg00071.html The
>> "invention" is a copyright of a somputer program for electronic mail
>> system called "EMAIL" (
>> http://cocatalog.loc.gov/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?v1=1&ti=1,1&Search_Arg=Ayyadurai&Search_Code=NALL&CNT=25&PID=FgMj1TMBIHWxOrn8bBBj7UbwOW7&SEQ=20120220122136&SID=1
>>
>> ).
>>
>> Regards,
>> -sm
>



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