RSS
Happy 30th Birthday to Spam Emails
By Joseph Hunkins at April 25, 2008 3 CommentsThe 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.
Labels: 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. >:-)