Simon F said:
What? Did you read what I wrote? I said that the word "email" existed as a trademark before the invention of electronic mail.
However Trademarks are industry specific. There are oodles of companies called "Sun", for example.
FWIW, things such as packet switched networks were also invented in other places, eg UK, according to the book "Where wizards stay up late" which chronicals the evolution of the internet.
Paul Baran published first, although Davies coined the term that stuck, "packet switching". However, most of the PC and Internet revolution happened in the US, thanks to a more friendly regulatory and capital environment, not to mention cheaper POTS service. This is reflected by the fact that most of the early internet companies are US based. Even before the Internet became popular for consumers, data networks were widespread here. FidoNet, USENET, and WWIV were carrying huge volumes of traffic. Compuserve and AOL's forerunner (Q-Link) were running strong, and there were hundreds of thousands of BBSes.
It's not really who invented it anyway, it's who brought it mainstream. (e.g. Hypertext was invented a long long time ago, but Ted Nelson couldn't bring Xanadu to the public) I was on the internet from about 1987. There were many failed web-like schemes. Even after Tim Berners-Lee introduced HTML and the first command line browser, no one really used the "Web" except a few people who accessed physics papers. The Web would have failed just like Gopher failed had it not been for Mosaic. It wasn't until 1993 when the first graphic browser was released that it began to pick up. But in my experience, it wasn't until ISPs like NETCOM, and later, AOL started signing up tons of people coupled with the release of Netscape 1.0, around '95 that it took off.
Once that happened, Silicon Valley took off, and overnight, billions of dollars were being funneled into companies like Yahoo, Amazon, Netscape, Cisco, etc.
