From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!seismo!hao!kpno!arizona!budd
Newsgroups: net.games.trivia
Title: Re: Who sent the first flame?
Article-I.D.: arizona.2099
Posted: Fri May  6 20:20:41 1983
Received: Tue May 17 19:55:40 1983
References: csu-cs.2195

no, i first heard the word flame used in this context when i was a graduate
student at Yale (78 or 79 or so).  We got some text formmating software from
CMU (i won't mention the name) and i had a hell of a time getting it to
produce documents in Yale Thesis format (this was an early version, later
versions were much easier to handle).  Anyway, when i wrote to the author
complaining about various things, i got a letter back that started "in
answer to your many flames...".  So perhaps like many other fine things
that have come out of cmu, that is where this term originated, too.