There's been rich-text email since (at least) 1980 and by the mid- to late-1980s there were many competing efforts: CMU's AMS, BBN's Diamond/Slate, NeXT's NeXTM

There's been rich-text email since (at least) 1980 and by the mid- to late-1980s there were many competing efforts: CMU's AMS, BBN's Diamond/Slate, NeXT's NeXTMail, and probably several others. I'd go so far as to argue that the parent's reaction -- "email should be plain-text" -- is exactly why the horrors of HTML are what we have today. No one adopted any of the better alternatives out there and then Netscape -- a web browser, after all -- hacked in HTML mail, and "worse is better" won the day yet again.