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.