[ih] Invention of term 'email'

[Ofer Inbar]

Dave Crocker <dhc2 at dcrocker.net> 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.

I see several interesting questions here.

1.
First, what this thread opened with: how/when was the term email coined?

Finding the earliest uses of that word is part of answering that question.

However, sometimes "obvious" words get made up independently multiple
times, and a more interesting and harder to answer question is, which
of those 'coinings' led to the word's later widespread use?  What is
the lineage of the word as used today, and which coining(s) does it
mostly stem from?

2.
Separately, though, the tangential question brought up by this
alternate claim to "invention" of email itself.  Clearly there
were already things we'd call "email" by any reasonable meaning
of the term, for a number of years before 1978.  However, this
claim - as detailed at http://www.inventorofemail.com/ - seems
to be based on the idea that Ayyadurai's "EMAIL" was an integrated
system including all of the features of interoffice memos, and
that previous email lacked some of these features.  While using
this to claim "invention of email" is IMO ridiculous, it still
looks like a description of an email system with features not
then present in other email software, and some of those features
are ubiquitious in email today.  Ayyadurai did make something new,
even if it wasn't the first something that can be called "email".

On this tangent, I think it would be interesting to:

a) Identify which features of Ayyadurai's EMAIL which are now common
in today's email software, did not exist in other email at the time.

b) To what extent was Ayyadurai's EMAIL an actual source of some
of those features spreading to the broader world of email?  Did
they get developed independently later on in other systems, or did
some or many of them get brought over from people familiar with
Ayyadurai's EMAIL, to other places or systems?

  -- Cos