[ih] propagation of early email?

[mfidelman at meetinghouse.net (Miles Fidelman)]

Hi Folks,

So... harkening back to the recent discussions on the "invention of 
email".....

Ray Tomlinson dates his work on inter-machine sendmsg to 1971.  I seem 
to recall arriving at MIT in Sept. 1971 and using email on the AI lab's 
ITS system very shortly thereafter.  Which leads to a question:  anybody 
have a sense of how Ray's work propagated from BBN to the rest of the world?

The only datapoint I have is from Ray's online accounting 
(http://openmap.bbn.com/~tomlinso/ray/firstemailframe.html) that states:
"These first messages were sent in late 1971. The next release of TENEX 
went out in early 1972 and included the version of SNDMSG with network 
mail capabilities."

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra