Did I coin the phrase "e-business?"

I don't know, but I'm going to claim it, just for the heck of it.

A while back, I got an email from an internal editor at IBM asking if I had invented the term "e-business." She Googled the phrase and found this posting I made to the BUSLIB-L newsgroup in 1993.

BUSLIB-L Digest - 28 Nov 1993 to 29 Nov 1993
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Steve Lubetkin Dec 1 1993, 1:44 pm show options

Newsgroups: bit.listserv.buslib-l
From: Steve Lubetkin - Find messages by this author
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 1993 13:19:02 -0500
Local: Wed, Dec 1 1993 10:19 am
Subject: Re: BUSLIB-L Digest - 28 Nov 1993 to 29 Nov 1993
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Regarding the Health Care Legislation virus alert that keeps making the rounds
here and in other groups:


The files on the disks that the White House distributed were plain vanilla ASCII
files. To my knowledge, there was no binary program distributed on the disks,
so there is really no way they could carry a virus. Does anyone here have
firsthand knowledge of a virus, or are we just reposting the same bogus alert
over and over again?


Stop the rumors, please. I really believe this story is false.


Steve Lubetkin
doing e-business as lubet...@mgh.com, slubet...@delphi.com,
76616....@compuserve.com, and wvpk...@prodigy.com

This appeared, she told me, to be the earliest known online usage of the term e-business. I responded to her that I would be happy to negotiate an arrangement for IBM to continue using the term. Shortly after that, they seemed to halt their use of the phrase. Another missed opportunity for fame and fortune. (Unlike Al Gore, I'm not claiming the entire Internet, just the phrase "e-business.")

Anyone have an earlier, documented use of the phrase, I'm willing to concede it.