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.

That commercial message, sent on 3 May 1978, drew a swift and negative reaction. Recipients complained directly to Thuerk, who had made no attempt to hide his identity, and DEC was reprimanded by the Arpanet administrators.

Today spam accounts for some 80-90% of all email – some 120,000,000,000 messages every day.