budd (05/07/83)
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.