[ih] "email"-- an opportunity.

[Miles Fidelman]

Jack Haverty wrote:
>
> I suspect there's some fascinating history of electronic mail 
> involving that E-COM proposal and why it never happened. Sounds like 
> another case where the experimental system trounced the official 
> one......later repeated by TCP, etc., etc.
>
> But I can't find anywhere either where they call it email. But I agree 
> with Noel -- I think the term "email" came from outside our community. 
> I vaguely recall first seeing it in something like a trade magazine or 
> newspaper article.
>

The OECD "appeal" included this:

----------------
The /OED/ currently has a first quotation for /electronic mail/ in this 
sense from 1975; the shorter /email/ is first attested four years later, 
in 1979. Although this doesn’t seem like a very large gap in time, it 
seems unlikely that the 1979 quotation represents the coinage of 
/email/, taken as it is from a professional journal:

    //1979 /Electronics/ 7 June 63 (heading) Postal Service pushes ahead
    with E-mail.

It seems probable that a computer whiz somewhere may have used /email 
/first. Perhaps earlier evidence lies in an internal company memo, a 
software manual, or even in an item of ‘electronic mail’? We’d like your 
help in finding such an example.
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-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra