Actually, e-mail goes back to well before Tomlinson. The Multics system, developed at MIT in the mid-60s, commercialized by GE and taken over by Honeywell when they bought GE's computer operations in 1970, had a well-developed e-mail system. What the Internet and Tomlinson did was to extend the concept to multiple computers connected via the Net, using a protocol that identified the computer someone was on and that different kinds of computers could understand. This, of course, made it incredibly more useful than the more limited Multics capability was, but to call it "inventing e-mail" is stretching a point beyond plausibility. It's kind of like saying that airplanes didn't exist until they could carry passengers on scheduled routes.

On the other topic of this thread, this is my real first name.