[SIGCIS-Members] Email History -- unresolved questions

[David Alan Grier]

Michigan email.  It had it by  1970 or 1971.  I was in 9th or 10th grade when I first used it.  

David

--------------------------------
David Alan Grier
Fellow, IEEE
President Elect, IEEE Computer Society 
Assoc. Prof., International Science & Technology Policy
Center for International Science and Technology Policy 
grier at gwu.edu




On Feb 28, 2012, at 11:41 PM, Thomas Haigh wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>  
> Thanks for all the messages that keep flooding in. To avoid duplication and wasted effort, I’m trying to be clearer on what specific topics we’re currently in need of hard evidence on.
>  
> One thing we do know about: the relevant RFCs (354, 385, 524, 561, 733, etc). Between these, Craig Partidge’s very thorough article and some personal communications from participants such as Ken Pogran I’m confident that we know what we need for this short article about ARPANET email and its evolution.
>  
> Unresolved questions:
>  
> ·         “Electronic mail,” as a phrase I have usage of Business Week going back to 1975. Am interested in earlier usage, particularly in publications aimed at business or the general public.
>  
> ·         “email” or “e-mail” as a word. A Google Groups (formerly Deja News) archive of a May 1981 post suggests that the Compuserve email program might have been called EMAIL. It’s clear from a news story that Compuserve had electronic mail in 1980. (Compuserve began in 1969 as a timesharing service provider and only later morphed to a personal computer oriented online service). Does anyone have documentation or other sources to confirm when it first offered email and what its command was called?
>  
> ·         How about other commercial timesharing services, such as TYMSHARE or COMSHARE? I assume they had electronic mail by some point in the early- to mid-1970s but have no evidence as yet. (We do know that APL offered its users an early and robust email system by about 1972). These systems might have offered the first way for an individual to buy email access (though of course there were no gateways between services in the 1970s).
>  
> ·         We know about CTSS email and the materials at multicians.org, and I’m in touch with Tom Van Vleck. As far as I know nobody has challenged its 1965 claim to be the first mail system on a computer. Are they any other serious claimants?
>  
> ·         How about other early timesharing systems, e.g. Michigan. There were some articles in Annals on Michigan timesharing I should pull up. Do we know when these got mail?
>  
> ·         Email attachments – anyone know when these emerged as a standard feature? I suspect maybe on office automation style email systems before Internet email, as I remember in the early 1990s having to UUENCODE things and send them in the message body for manual decoding using SUN UNIX. Can’t imagine office workers putting up with that.
>  
> ·         XEROX PARC email for the Alto. Probably a milestone in terms of GUI client. Best source I know on its “Laurel” software is Butler Lampsons chapter in History of Personal Workstations. That includes a 1981 screenshot. Anyone know of any descriptions or publications prior to that date, or in more detail. Also when did it became operational?
>  
> Thanks,
> 
> Tom
>  
>  
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