Can you believe it? Last year we celebrated the 40th anniversary of email.

It’s pretty amazing how far the medium has come in nearly half a century: creating the electronic messaging system, using the first smiley, coining the word spam…

So much has changed and evolved in how, why and how much we use email to communicate.

And the email timeline can be just as fascinating as the emails we send. Here are some of our favorite email memories from the last four decades:

• In 1976, British Queen Elizabeth II became the first head of state to send an email in a demonstration of networking technology on an army base.
• The word email is actually 30 years old, being first used in 1982.
• Microsoft Outlook is released the same year the company bought Hotmail for an incredible $400 million – in 1997.
• Nearly 20 years ago, we learned Homer Simpson’s email address: chunklover53@aol.com.
• In 2004, multimedia emails entered the scene after the MMS World Congress in Vienna.