Happy 30th Birthday to Spam Emails
By Joseph Hunkins at April 25, 2008 3 Comments|
The scourge of spam emailings gets older each day, older than many of the people now shaping the technology that has so far failed – in a fairly spectacular and dramatic fashion – to free most users from the overwhelming nightmare of too much email. On May 3rd Spam will officially – well, sort of officially – reach it’s 30th year of age. As New Scientist reports it all started back in 1978: Thirty years ago next week, Gary Thuerk, a marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation, sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the US government-run computer network that eventually became the internet. It was the first spam email ever. Today spam accounts for some 80-90% of all email – some 120,000,000,000 messages every day. |
Tags:
spam, technology



3 Comments
The irony is that spam bots are probably scraping that article as we speak and posting it to hundreds of spam blogs littered with google adsense ads.
Ha – probably true Simon ….
Ha! I remember that spam. I was one of those 393 people who got it! Yeah, we were all p—ed, and as I recall a few people “did something about it” too. >:-)