[ih] The Atlantic on Email

[John Levine]

>> Agree with Noel, it was widely used within the ARPANET . . . almost immediately as I remember.
>
>Not to mention the uucp world, and email over rscs became very big between IBM mainframes
>in academia. So the meme spread well before there was a real Internet.

>> You have to wonder about a historian who can’t interpret the historical record in context.

If you look at the online article again, there's now an asterisk next
to the 1971 date which links to a footnote which says that the origins
of e-mail are contentious and links to a bunch of reasonable other sources,
including one debunking the guy who claims he invented EMAIL in 1982.