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

Miles Fidelman mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
Fri Jul 24 06:22:17 PDT 2015


Or just credit Shiva Ayyadurai with inventing the term, and be done with 
it ;-)

Miles Fidelman wrote:
> Assuming that they're looking for a published reference, I expect that 
> we're talking literature that predates stuff that's easily findable on 
> the web - old journal articles, technical documentation, science 
> fiction, maybe a transcript of talk by or interview with someone like 
> Vannevar Bush, Licklider, or Doug Engelbart (maybe one of those Cerf 
> or Kahn guys).
>
> A lot of that stuff is online - but not easily searchable (e.g., the 
> PDF document collection at bitsavers), older articles that have been 
> scanned as images from microfiche, and such.
>
>
>
> Vint Cerf wrote:
>> Oxford English Dictionary looking for early usage of the term "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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>
>
> -- 
> In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
> In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra
>


-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra




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