[ih] Any suggestions for first uses of "e-mail" or "email"?

Vint Cerf vint at google.com
Fri Jul 24 04:16:13 PDT 2015


i read the material there but found little to help determine whether the
formulation "email" was found prior to 1979. It is so common now, it is
hard to believe we were not using this abbreviation of "electronic mail'
shortly after the 1971 development of SNDMSG's extension to inter-computer
messaging.

vint


On Fri, Jul 24, 2015 at 6:41 AM, <dave.walden.family at gmail.com> wrote:

> I believe there was considerable discussion of this on the sigcis.org
> list back when the guy claimed to have invented at a young age.  I think
> the sigcis.org archive can be accessed without  a password.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jul 24, 2015, at 5:21 AM, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:
>
> Oxford English Dictionary looking for early usage of the term "email"
>
> <http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/>
> http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/
>
>         Before email was email it was electronic mail. Although
>         the shorter form is by far the more common name today, the full
>         form electronic mail of course came first (otherwise how would
>         anybody know what the 'e' meant?). It was only as people became
>         more familiar with the system that they could shorten this to
>         the snappier email. E- is now used in this way to form a
>         plethora of technology words such as e-commerce and e-book, but
>         email is where it all began.  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.
>
>  - - -
>
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