[ih] "email"-- an opportunity.

[Jack Haverty]

I'm not so sure that a techie would necessarily have coined the term 
"email".  I can't recall any other such 70s construction -- "e-file", or 
"e-message" or "e-typewriter" or whatever.    Does anybody else?  
Everything we did was "E-" so it would have been redundant.  Even today, 
what other e-things are there...?

On the other hand, the USPS did have "E-COM", so it seems reasonable 
that the "E-" construction came from outside the ARPANET community, 
where "mail" still meant that stuff that appeared once a day in the 
inbox sitting on your desk, and a new term was needed to describe the 
fancy new stuff.

It's quite possible that I'm remembering that Electronics article in 
1979.  That was not long after the Postal Service proposal.  I suspect 
there was a lot of trade press coverage about that, even if it didn't 
matter much to us ARPANET denizens.  I do recall reading Electronics 
back then.  It of course must have arrived via my inbox, desktop 
variety.  It seems to me plausible that some writer or editor decided 
that "electronic mail" was too unwieldy and just shortened it to 
"e-mail" following the lead of the Postal Service with "E-COM".

The OED may be interested in hearing that, with all the august oldtimers 
on this list, none have (yet) recalled or found a pre-1979 use of the 
term "e-mail".  That in itself is an interesting data point.

We didn't call ourselves "whiz" either.  The highest technical accolade 
was "hacker".  "Whiz" involved porcelain.

/Jack


On 06/05/2013 08:52 PM, John Day wrote:
> It is highly likely that "email" or "e-mail" occurred in email or 
> other informal communication long before it appeared in print.  The 
> problem is that with electronic media of the time, i.e. having 
> equipment that would still read it, we may well have lost those 
> occurrences.
>
> At 11:20 PM -0400 6/5/13, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>> 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.
>> ------------------
>>
>> **
>>
>> -- 
>> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>> In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
>