[ih] Invention of term 'email'

[John Day]

No, I am pretty sure that very soon after we had email running, we 
were using the term email.  I know by the time I moved to Houston in 
'76 and was working at Illinois and commuting over the Net, I use to 
speak of "living on email."  We were using it before that.

Even that quote from Electronics that the OED cites, indicates the 
term must have been use for some time to show up in a mainstream tech 
magazine like that.

(I have see this before.  (bear with me on this)  I used the word 
"druthers" once, as in What's your druthers?"  A southern or rural 
contraction of "I'd rather" to mean "what is your preference?" Called 
on it, I checked the OED.  The OED says the first use is something 
like 1885, Mark Twain.  Now you *know* it was in use for decades 
before that and Twain was just writing down how people talked, but no 
one writing in a newspaper or other outlet would have used it in 
print.  It wasn't "proper English." )

Now email isn't in that category, but you get the idea.   We were 
using it for a long time before it would have showed up in print. 
With the ubiquity of the Internet today, it is hard for most people 
and even those of us who were in it to remember how small that group 
of people was.  The fact that its use didn't reach the OED scouts is 
not surprising.  Think how much text generated in the 70s that never 
got archived on paper but on 7-track reels of tape that are no longer 
readable and lost.

Or was archived on paper is sitting boxes in our basements and attics 
unavailable to the OED!  ;-)  Aren't all programmers pack rats!  ;-)

John

At 19:42 -0500 2012/06/18, Guy Almes wrote:
>Noel,
>   I agree.  If you'd asked me, I'd have said I'd been using email 
>since the mid-70s (grad school days at CMU-CS), but it might have 
>taken several years for the term to develop.
>	-- Guy
>
>On 6/18/12 7:14 PM, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>      >  From: Eric Gade<eric.gade at gmail.com>
>>
>>      >  It seems that Network World is asking the wrong question, from a
>>      >  historian's perspective. It doesn't matter when the specific term
>>      >  'email' was coined. What matters is the evolution of electronic mail
>>
>>Right, but we already know pretty much all about that (some people here
>>actually did some of it). The question of 'where the term came from' is thus
>>really the only open question.
>>
>>	Noel