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 More»

Labels: spam, technology

Ray Tomlinson invented email some 37 years ago when working for a tech firm in Cambridge, MA. In a recent interview with the Times of London Tomlinson said he never anticipated the spam problems that email would bring to us all.
The Times cites an estimate that suggests on average we spend 52 hours per year dealing with email spam. This is a staggering loss of productivity given that this would represent about 2.5% of a normal 40 hour work week simply killing off or otherwise filtering and dealing with spam messages.
Tomlinson, now 66 More»

Labels: email, spam, times of london