Tom Van Vleck wrote this: http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html Knowing Tom, I'm sure it's accurate. The key paragraph regarding this instance of the invention of e-mail is: My colleague Noel Morris and I were new members of the MIT sponsored research staff in spring 1965, working for the Political Science department. When we read the PSN document about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, we asked "where is it?" and were told there was nobody available to write it. Noel and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user. (We made a few changes from the proposal during the course of implementation: e.g. to read one's mail, users just used the PRINT command instead of a special argument to MAIL.) I don't know if there was an earlier invention, but of course there might have been. Regards, Jon On Sep 3, 2014, at 2:03 PM, Victor Miller <victorsmiller@gmail.com> wrote:
I also find this very irritating. When I was at BB&N in 1971 we had a primitive form of email, which, I believe, was just called messages. When I first worked at IBM Yorktown in the summer of 1977 that had a rather well-developed email system as part of their internal VNET. And of course there's usenet (I don't remember when this first started).
Victor
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Whitfield Diffie <whitfield.diffie@gmail.com
wrote:
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