Um, okay... Maybe one aspect of email is *officially* twenty years old, but email is actually *thirty* years old. It was developed by Roy Tomlinson in 1972, who was working for BBN after graduating from MIT.
http://www.scim.vuw.ac.nz/comms/502Resources/502NotesFive.htmA programmer, Earl Sacerdoti, that I met several years at Portola Dimensional Systems, ago told me that he believes he's the first person to have included his email address on his business card. this was in 1975. He has a photo of the card:
http://www.copernican.com/personal.htmlFrom Earl's site:
"I have a business card from 1975 with an Internet address
(of course, it was an ARPAnet address at the time) printed
on it. I haven't been able to find anyone else with a business
card older than that with a 'net address. Please send me
mail (
mailto:earl@copernican.com) if you have one that's
older. I was organizing a project at SRI to build software
that queried multiple databases distributed around the
ARPAnet. Because I was collaborating with folks in Boston,
Washington, Los Angeles, and San Diego who were all also
on the net, I found myself always jotting my email address
on my cards. So when I was promoted and needed new cards,
I asked to have my email address printed on them. SRI
supported creativity, so they arranged it.
Roy Tomlinson of BBN released the first intercomputer email
application in 1972, so there were about three years in which
someone else could have produced such a card."
