Well... I remember in 1996 when first working on the US west coast at a research institute that the prof. would have his admin assistant print-out emails; he would hand-write responses that the admin assistant would type into the computer :-D
I worked for a large computer systems company starting in the second half of the 80s. We had minicomputer based email all along--we made the computers and the software. But there were definitely execs who did likewise.
