I'm not sure what you see in the WaPo statement.  I agree that Chomsky is a supporter, but he is countered by two computer historians and by the lack of mention in written accounts of email development and the computer industry in the 1970s, as well as by people involved with email development who say they never heard of EMAIL and disagree it represented anything substantially new.  The Smithsonian statement clearly says that EMAIL was accepted mainly for two reasons having nothing to do with email.  There is that last paragraph, which I think you properly added mention of to the article here.  So....I think we've made as much of a case as we can in this article.  And we've mentioned EMAIL in the email article on the strength of the Smithsonian collection .  But in terms of EMAIL being important, influential, a benchmark in the history of the technologyit's hard to pull out much more of a ringing endorsement than what we've got without further evidence.  Re: Gizmodo: thanks for the clarification.