Political Science Invented the Interwebs

It's a series of tubes, right? Anyway, Errol Morris writes about how his brother helped set up the first e-mail system in the MIT political science department:

In 1965, at the beginning of the year, there was a bunch of stuff going on with the time-sharing system that Noel and I were users of. We were working for the political science department. And the system programmers wrote a programming staff note memo that proposed the creation of a mail command. But people proposed things in programming staff notes that never got implemented. And well, we thought the idea of electronic mail was a great idea. We said, "Where's electronic mail? That would be so cool." And they said, "Oh, there's no time to write that. It's not important." And we said, "Well, can we write it?" And we did. And then it became part of the system.

From political science to you, world. Kind of. Okay not really.

(How crazy is it that e-mail was originally deemed "not important".)

Via.