Twitter found Jack Dorsey cites his RIM 850 pager, AIM updates and a system he programmed using both as orgin of Twitter..

Read the rest here....I just thought it was interesting. We are talking around 2001 and since this is something I wanted to know too, I thought I'd share. 


"I loved seeing at a glance my friends status updates. But I also really appreciated at the same time the dispatch aspect, where you're out in the world doing something away from the keyboard and IM did not allow that," said Dorsey. "I had a RIM pager, the 850, the first email device. I programed a system where I could fire off an email from that and set my status from anywhere. And it worked! And I was able to also at a regular interval pull my buddy list and get those updates sent to my email address. It was awesome! But the number of people who had those mobile devices was so minimal that the timing was just not right. This was 2001."
In 2006, when he was working for Evan Williams at Odeo, Dorsey resurrected the idea. He combined the timeline aspects of LiveJournal with the status updates of instant messenger and the concept of dispatch software that delivers them all remotely. Boom. That's Twitter.