Okay, this is kind of stupid, on his part.

It's true that RFC 822 came out after he claims to have invented email. It obsoleted RFC 733, where you find To, Cc, Bcc, and in fact much of what was (better-) formalized in 822. 1977. If November 1977 is insufficiently early, then 733 obsoleted 724, which was released in May of that year (and is basically a first attempt).

He didn't "invent" email. He implemented something that a lot of people were doing. Crocker et al. invented the format used for messages, as described in the series of RFCs 724 - 733 - 822. See rfc-editor.org for details.

Amy!

Actually, there are additional reasons that it won't work.

Consider the setup. You have some sort of video display. You have some sort of camera. The body language of your eyes is suddenly all wrong.

Suppose the camera is mounted at the left or right side of the display. You look frankly into the (displayed) eyes ... and to the viewer on the other end, you're looking off to one side. You're very interested, watching their face. To them, you're looking off to one side.

The situation worsens with a top or bottom mount.

Supposing that you realize this, and play to it ... now when you look directly into someone's eyes, you can only actually see their face in peripheral vision.

Put the camera into the middle of the display. Most women have *already* encountered men who can't move their eyes up quite high enough. Big loser there.

Now, add the whole silly idea of conference calling, where there are multiple people involved. Who is looking at who, exactly? Too strange. Here's a meeting environment that feels as though everyone were feeling weasely, looking anywhere but at you ....

The breakthrough technology is to have a camera somehow sit behind the displayed eyes of the person that it is displaying to. I don't think we're even remotely close to there yet. Until then, though, the system is transmitting not signal, not noise, but the wrong signal.

Amy!