[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by ardeegee

BTW, for those curious about "snail mail" or "snailmail", it doesn't start showing up on Usenet until 1992:

http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...=b&sitesearch=

http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...=b&sitesearch=

"Snail mail" has a few isolated mentions in print media (at least, the subset of print media indexed by Google) in the 1980s, and even ones as early as the 1950s

http://news.google.com/archivesearch...nav=od&btnG=Go

The compound word "snailmail" has isolated print media instances as early as the nineteen teens, but, like "snail mail," doesn't seem to have gained popularity until the 1990s:

http://news.google.com/archivesearch...nav=od&btnG=Go

That is pretty much to be expected. Snail mail doesn't have anything to do with the documents we call mail but rather with the post office that takes days/weeks to deliver it. Thus email is almost instant delivery while snail mail takes a while to get delivered. It wasn't until the late 80's and earlier 90's that email suddenly made main stream and the comparison made sense.

Dale