Email History -- unresolved questions
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
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@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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·“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.
The _Oxford English Dictionary_ is always worth a look for this kind of query. The team who deal with these things put a lot of work into tracing authenticated uses as far back as they can (working to a fairly strict standard of authentication); a typical word entry gives the first known usage of any kind, followed by a series of later ones to illustrate the process of popularisation and/or subtle changes of meaning. Thus, for "electronic mail", they give 1959 _Appleton [Wisconsin] Post-Crescent_ 2 Nov. a6/4 Postmaster General Summerfield plans split-second electronic mail. 1969 _Law & Contemp. Probl._ 34 447 Facsimile newspaper or electronic mail delivery. 1977 _Science_ 18 Mar. 1161/1 Electronic mail can be originated by conventional means (typewriter, handwriting, printing). 1978 _Globe & Mail_ [Toronto] 8 Dec. 4/5 The world's first completely electronic mail service is scheduled to start operating in Canada this February. And for "email"/"e-mail", 1979 _Electronics_ 7 June 63 (heading) Postal Service pushes ahead with E-mail. This corresponds to the snippet at books.google.co.uk/books?id=xTFWAAAAMAAJ&q="e-mail"+intitle:electronics&dq="e-mail" which is enough to show that "Postal Service" is the USPS. Does anyone here have access to a back run of _Electronics_, I wonder? Perhaps surprisingly, the OED doesn't see any noteworthy changes to the circulation of "e-mail" till much later than the episode we're interested in -- 1986 -- when it appears (without scarequotes) in the _Times_ of London. It first finds "email" without the hyphen in 2005, which I suspect could easily be antedated. As a aside, the first authenticated use of "email" as a verb is as follows: 1983 Computokid in net.micro (Usenet newsgroup) 25 Aug., Young stuff interested in correspondence (via dull old paper mail) might email a letter to me to forward. As a much further aside aside, "email" is actually found in 1684, and "emayle" in 1594 -- but as a variant of "enamel". Hope this helps! James
participants (3)
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David Alan Grier -
James Sumner -
Thomas Haigh