Thanks for the book mention. It led me (on Amazon) to another title, “Where Wizards Stay Up Late” — more on the invention of the Internet. A snipped on the invention of e-mail led me to this link:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~scotch/innovation/inventing_email.pdf
“In a paper published in 1978 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, two of the important figures in the creation of the ARPANET, J. C. R. Licklider and Albert Vezza, explained the popularity of e-mail. “One of the advantages of the message systems over letter mail was that, in an ARPANET message, one could write tersely and type imperfectly, even to an older person in a superior position and even to a person one did not know very well, and the recipient took no offense. . . . Among the advantages of the network message services over the telephone were the fact that one could proceed immediately to the point without having to engage in small talk first, that the message services produced a preservable record, and that the sender and receiver did not have to be available at the same time.””
It’s sort of sad to see in this paragraph the seeds of incivility being sown by the new technology.