E-mail is 30 years old. Happy birthday to the ever-rising tidal wave of electronic messages that have become the blessing and the curse of the information age.

The birthday is, however, a bit like the Queen's - an officially accepted anniversary, not the real thing.

Jim Breen, of the school of computer science and software engineering at Monash University, reckons the real birthday of electronic mail could be back in the 1920s when telex machines first talked to one another. Or it might have been in the 1960s when some companies began using mainframe-based messaging.

The real genesis of e-mail was in the late 1960s, when the US Defence Department was building ARPANet (the Advanced Research Project Agency Network), the earliest incarnation of today's massive global Internet.

"But 1971 is now the generally accepted beginnings of e-mail as we know it now," Professor Breen said. "In those days I was working for the Postmaster-General's Department, building an early packet-switching network called CUDN (Common User Data Network), which had a basic e-mail facility, although we didn't think of it as such."

CUDN did not really get off the ground, and common user networks in Australia really began with AARNet (Australian Academic and Research Network), launched in 1989 as the Australian arm of the then fast-growing global Internet by the big Australian universities and the CSIRO.

Today billions of e-mail messages are generated every day, many of them automatically, to flood the world's telecommunications networks.

E-mail's father is generally conceded to be Ray Tomlinson, the now almost unremembered chief engineer for BBN Technologies, a software company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of MIT and the renowned Media Lab, an IT pantheon wherein dwell such icons as Patti Maes, Marvin Minsky and Nicholas Negroponte.

Mr Tomlinson can't now remember the first e-mail message he sent. "It might have been a line from the Gettysburg address, and it might just have been QWERTYUIOP," he said. "All I remember is that it was all in capitals."