Welcome to the computer age. It's May 1980 and Antonia Salmon, 4, writes her first blog on her father's computer. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Blogging turned 10 recently, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

That would make it about a year younger than widespread e-mailing, according to that other bastion of the corporate world, Microsoft. Last year it announced it was celebrating Hotmail's 10th birthday. In a press release, the company patted itself on the back for "dramatically revolutionizing our communication habits."

That's all very nice — pass the cake, please — but it would be more accurate to say that easier-to-use e-mail and blogging programs have been around for about a decade or so. Earlier e-mail systems can be more precisely pegged to the late-1960s, while keeping a web diary, which is the essence of a blog, began with the inception of the World Wide Web in 1992.

With computer systems, "there's always a lot of marketing, positioning and jostling, so that anyone would want to claim that they were first at it," observes Eugene Fiume, a University of Toronto computer science professor.

A self-professed member of the original "geeky" few who e-mailed early on, Fiume sent electronic messages while at university in the 1970s.

"It was a little bit like putting your e-mail in a railway cabin and just seeing it go across the country," he recalls.

In those days, long-distance charges applied to e-mail. Messages would travel through computer phone cables, also known as "trunk lines," batched up like virtual post office mail. They could sometimes take longer than regular post to arrive.

The fact that people like Fiume were using primitive computer messaging while most were still trying to master Pong is not common knowledge. What's better known is that the internet has been around for quite some time: the U.S. military first used it in the 1960s to share information between computers.

Steve Jobs and the Apple II in 1977. (Canadian Press)

Indeed, the lack of awareness about early e-mailing systems, and programs like talk, used for UNIX-based real-time chatting, has made it easier for big companies like Microsoft to take credit for technological milestones.

But dig past the hype and one of the more interesting artefacts is that Canadians figured prominently in some of these early developments. Fiume recalls people at the University of Toronto developing cumbersome e-mailing technology into something better.

They were a very small group there interested in seeing the medium flourish, he notes, joking: "A lot of them looked like the Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons."

Local e-mailing networks started taking off in the late 1970s. Even the Queen had sent her first e-mail by 1976, from an army base. So how many candles should we put on this cake exactly?

Free-mailing before ads

By the 1980s, Fiume knew at least one person from the University of Toronto who developed and sold a robust e-mailing system. More savvy businesses, including newspapers, broadcasters and others in the communications field, picked up on this new medium. "They were text-based interfaces. They weren't the point and click things we have now," says Fiume.

Business people typed out messages into plain text-based programs often guided by a green, flashing cursor. And when they became involved, everything changed.

"Like anything else, if there's a way to make money, the entrepreneurial people will catch on," says Leslie Chan, a senior new media studies lecturer, also at the University of Toronto.

Chan recalls that on BITNET, an internet-like system with e-mail and user groups, advertisers were restricted, making it a far distant relation to modern Hotmail, or Gmail, which displays ads alongside messages, and even targets them to fit with the correspondence.

"There was absolutely no commercial activity allowed. Even if someone were to advertise their own book, that was frowned upon, and that person was immediately booted out," says Chan.

Chan and his colleagues were a minority, ahead of the curve, that used BITNET for education and to share research ideas with other academics.

At that time, the big computer giants were among the slowest to catch on. It wasn't until the mid-1990s that companies like Hotmail reached an audience outside of nerdy computer science and math circles. Even Hotmail had a geeky life before Microsoft took it over 10 years ago.

Prior to that, it was known as HoTMaiL Corp, based in Sunnyvale, Calif. Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia, a duo working at other technology companies, backed by a venture capitalist, started the enterprise.

Fourteen months after they launched, in 1996, HoTMaiL Corp. had already scored 6.5 million "freemailers," as they were known. Other companies offering free web-based e-mail were Excite, Juno and Four 11's Rocketmail.

Early blogging, a bevy of links and blinking images

Some early home pages were diaries in chronological order. People who were politically active would record their exploits and travels. Rather than hitting publish, these pioneering few would simply upload their diary updates to servers themselves, Fiume points out.

Weblogs evolved as the web did. The first blogs existed shortly after people went online in 1992. They just weren't called that. Before that, in the mid-1980s, there was a flurry of moderated newsgroups, many on technical subjects related to the web, which can be seen as a precursor of today's interactive blog with its post and respond features.

Most commonly in those early days, programmers tracking software updates kept web-based diaries. They were used for computer support online. "The development of Linux essentially came from a blog," Fiume explains.

Beyond the bevy of links and blinking images, blogs that were nicer to look at and easier to publish soon moved on to influence information dissemination on a larger scale. In 1998, the Drudge Report spilled the beans about former U.S. president Bill Clinton's alleged affair with Monica Lewinsky, minutes after Newsweek had just killed the story.

Fiume figures this scoop-snagging aspect of blogging "peaked around 2003."

A one-up for citizen journalists and the conspiracy theorists among them, blogs more recently co-opted by big companies have become an extension of the advertorial. Media outlets, airline companies and book publishers offer up the latest writer's work or a deal on plane tickets. Today, the blog search engine Technorati keeps track of more than 71 million blogs.

"The main issue now is that it's hard to discern among blogs, e-mail and news," Fiume says.

What will be the fate of information on the web then? "It'll be a matter of distinguishing through all the threads."