There's a real howler going on on Huffingtonpost.com about the history of email. An MIT professor (!) named Deborah Nightingale claims that email was invented in 1978. Perhaps she hasn't talked with anyone at MIT/Stanford/CMU/BBN/Xerox/IBM/DEC/BellLabs/... about this?
Her five-myths article does cite a variety of people and documents from those places. I find the result very irritating. When this first appeared on Dave Farber's IP list a few days ago, it seemed to claim that the invention was implementing the header format of office memos. I looked at my files and first find that format in messages from 1976. As I read Nighengale's piece, it seems the issue is the use of the word ``email.'' Another look at my files fails to find anything called email before the 1990s; prior to that, I just called it ``mail'' and largely still do. There are times when a development incorporates all the pieces so that later systems all look like that and less like anything earlier. Prior to this, I had never heard of V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai and I wonder what influence his email system system had on the main stream of development. Whit