John Kahane ([info]jkahane) wrote,
@ 2008-05-01 09:48:00
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Current mood: disgusted
Current music:Loreena McKennitt -"Marrakesh Night Market"
Entry tags:birthday, computer, e-mail, peeve, spam

30 Years of Spam
Believe it or not, today is the anniversary of spam e-mail.

Thirty years ago today, May 1st, 1978, Gary Thuerk was a salesman for Digital Equipment Corp. He managed to connect a computer to the Arpanet (what the Internet was called at the time), and sent a message advertising a new computer to 390+ folks on Arpanet. He was slapped down by the first "stop sending us spam" type message, and it didn't happen again for another 10 years. However, the model was set, and today about 120 billion spam messages are sent each day, accounting for 85 percent of all Internet traffic.

And we owe it all to Mr. Thuerk.

Happy birthday, Spam. We hates you, we does, yes, we do.




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[info]absinthe_dot_ca
2008-05-01 06:24 pm UTC (link)
While it was technically the first spam, the first commercial spam (and on Usenet for that matter) didn't come along for another 16 years... That one is the one that sort of opened the floodgates...

(Reply to this)(Thread)


[info]jkahane
2008-05-02 02:17 pm UTC (link)
True, but some would argue that that was the first "commercial" spam, even if it wasn't on what is called the Internet. I just thought it was an interesting thing to point out to folks, and relevant in this age of spam computerism.

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