Henry> 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? The Boy Who Invented Email -- History of Email http://www.huffingtonpost.com/larry-weber/the-history-of-email-boy-who-inven... <HGB Just adding my fuzzy memories to the confusion. The MIT AI Lab Incompatible Timesharing System had an instant messaging command. E.g. to talk to Tom Knight, :SEND TK mumble mumble <ctrl something, probably z> . But if he wasn't logged in, as soon as you typed TK, ITS would insert "(MAIL)". ("Oh cr@p, he just logged out on me.") I.e., mail was mostly considered just a poor substitute for chatting. I came West in '74. I'm pretty sure this was in place well before. The Stanford AI Lab independently developed a mail system, and many of its old timers think they were the pioneers. "Electronic Mail" started gaining attention in the 80s. The Postal Service, wanting to get in on the action, held a big conference someplace. But they thought "electronic mail" meant faxing. --rwg