It’s the 29th anniversary of the copyrighting of the term ‘email’ and the man who helped pioneer the first modern email system looks back at how it was invented.

It was 29 years ago today that V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai copyrighted the term "email"—actually, "EMAIL" to be precise. Depending on what you're reading (and when you were reading it), you might also have seen "e-mail," "E-mail," "Email," "eMail," or "electronic mail." But no matter how it's spelled, email has become a permanent fixture in all of our lives since its official naming day on Aug. 30, 1982.

But email actually got its start long before it got its permanent name. Shiva, an MIT alumnus and professor, traces the history of electronic mail in this handy infographic, which includes his own work in developing an email system back in 1978 when he was just 14 years old.

Important milestones in the creation of what would become email include Tom Van Vleck's and Leonard Kleinrock's work on computer messaging transactions in the 1960s, while Ray Tomlinson laid the groundwork for multi-computer, multi-user message transactions in 1971. Two years later, the creation of the TCP/IP Internet Protocol Suite by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn for DARPA, and Bob Metcalfe's and David Boggs' invention of the Ethernet standard really got the ball rolling.

By the late 1970s, many "emails" had been sent across ARPANET and other networks, but the formatting and fields didn't resemble those of the modern Web and client-based email systems we use today. Shiva, borrowing from intra-office memo standards, developed such long-standing email institutions as the "To:," "From:," and "CC:" fields, while also helping to standardize the Inbox, Outbox, and folder-based filing system used in all modern email clients.

It took another decade or more for email to really hit the public consciousness with the rise of readily available Internet access in the 1990s, and more time for Web-based and mobile email to emerge. But the rise of email in the years since its first lurching steps has been nothing short of explosive.

As Shiva's infographic highlights, we've gone from 1,000 total email accounts in the entire world at the time of his 1982 copyrighting of the term to 3.1 billion accounts as of 2011. That's a message worth forwarding to all your contacts.