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

Ted Faber faber at isi.edu
Fri Jul 24 07:48:36 PDT 2015


On 07/24/2015 04:29, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > Oxford English Dictionary looking for early usage of the term "email"
> 
> Well, going on the thought that they likely wanted a published reference, I
> immediately turned to the RFC's. I looked at almost every RFC with 'mail' in
> the name, but as of 1978 (after their cited first use), the term 'electronic
> mail' still had not appeared.
> 
> The term in use in the ARPANET community seems to have been 'network mail';
> so I would expect that 'electronic mail' originated elsewhere, and only
> became the common name in the ARPANET/Internet community once it was the de
> facto name everywhere else.

This is completely anecdotal, but Mike Padlipsky never used the term
"e-mail" without adding "or netmail as we called it when we were
inventing it."  This was years after the fact, but he definitely
preferred the earlier term.


-- 
Ted Faber, Computer Scientist, USC/ISI
http://www.isi.edu/~faber
http://www.isi.edu/~faber/contact.html

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