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

[Jack Haverty]

After grubbing through my basement storage, I haven't found "email" in
any of my piles of old paper....sorry about that.

But I *do* recall the first time I saw the phrase "email", although not
exactly where and when that was.

Through the early and mid-70s, I was a student and subsequently staff
member in Professor Licklider's group at MIT project MAC.  Lick had been
promoting the ideas of man-computer synergy for a while -- how to use
the power of the computer to augment human communications.   While I was
there, he also returned for another tour of duty at ARPA; he bounced
back and forth between MIT and ARPA.

Lick, and his "Chief of Staff" Al Vezza, drove our group to explore
man/computer synergy, especially using the brand-new IMP sitting at the
end of our rows of PDP-10 cabinets.

For one project, I wrote the mail software for our PDP-10; Ken Pogran
did so for Multics; Ken Harrenstien wrote the code for the MIT-AI
PDP-10.  These had some interesting interactions during that era -
early-mid 70s!

Outside of writing code, we were engaged in a continuous conversation
with other people on the ARPANET, sorting out just what this new
technology was all about.   ARPA formed a committee called CAHCOM
(Computer Aided Human Communications) to explore the possibilities.

One of the aspects on which Lick and therefore Al were especially
focused was the spectrum of "human communications" which could be
"aided".  This included everything from short notes ("Lunch anyone?") to
formal documents (Proposals for next year's contract, as documents with
multiple authors, reviewers, approvals, readers, etc.).  It also
included many of the ancillary processes from the non-electronic world,
e.g., notarization, archival, proof-of-delivery, return-receipt,
restricted-delivery, mail-room routing (e.g., having an address such as
"support" go to the current person on duty in Tech Support), searching
and retrieval, etc.   I put support for "aiding" a lot of these
functions into the mail system I wrote, but there was no standardized
way to convey that information in the network protocols at the time (or
even now for that matter...)

There was no established terminology for the computer form of all this.
 I remember we tried to promote the use of different terms for different
kinds of such communications.   E.G., Al Vezza tried, unsuccessfully, to
get the community to use the term "Communique" for messages used in more
formal organization-to-organization types of interactions.

Sadly, little of this caught on.  The community was focused on getting
the basic person-person communications of what we called netmail to work
reliably.  Probably a good thing....

None of the terminology we discussed then included "email" or "e-mail".

But I do still recall first seeing that term, and being discouraged that
all of the work and discussions about the breadth of computer-aided
human communications was being lumped into a single vague and ambiguous
term "email" (or maybe "e-mail").

The term was used in one of the trade publications popular at the time,
which had grown up around the emerging technologies of computer
networking.   I'm sorry I can't remember which one.  Most likely it was
Network World, or Communications Week, which were very popular at the
time and had discovered the world of networking.   It was a "newspaper"
type of publication, not a magazine or journal.   The kind of thing you
read while eating lunch.

I remember cringing at the thought that someone took the simple approach
of coining an obvious new word without explaining what it actually
meant.  I don't know if they were the first to use the term; but it was
the first one I saw.

As for timing, I can be pretty sure that it happened while I was still
at MIT, which narrows it down to between 1966 and summer 1977.   That's
when I joined BBN to work on TCP/IP for Unix and other projects that
were part of the Internet, and stopped working in the "CAHCOM" world.

So, I think an appropriate place to search for "email" would be the
trade press of the 1977+- era.   Does anybody know of an archive of such
history?

HTH,
/Jack Haverty




On 07/24/2015 02:21 AM, 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.
> 
>  - - -
> 
> 
> _______
> internet-history mailing list
> internet-history at postel.org
> http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
> Contact list-owner at postel.org for assistance.
>