“Celebrate” 30 years of frustration - with junk mail spam

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Monday, 05 May 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! Happy Birthday, spam – you’re 30 years old, and while most of us hope that you get a heart attack and die before you turn 31, chances are you’ll outlive us all. Gary Thuerk, the man credited with sending out the first spam message on May 1, 1978, thought it might be a good idea to send 393 users of ARPANET, one of the Internet’s ancestors, a market message about Digital Equipment Corporation, or DEC. The message had an advertisement to see a new DEC System 20 family 2020 machine at two different addresses in California, and had been sent out to all Californian members of ARPANET. The original message, and the comments in its aftermath, can be seen at this site . As you can imagine, people weren’t too thrilled to be getting an advertisement on their email, especially given the fact that APRANET was meant to be for ‘official US Government business’ at the time. DEC is no longer in business – they were purchased by Compaq who was later purchased by HP, but spam’s legacy lives on, not that it was called spam way back in 1978. Spam was given its name thanks to a Monthy Python skit were all the food in a restaurant came with some of the processed meat, SPAM, with part of the skit repeating the word SPAM over and over to comical effect. SPAM, the company, tried to disassociate the word spam with junk email, but once the word spam stuck in the public mind, there was little that Hormel, the company behind the processed meat, SPAM, could do about it. Nowadays, most modern email programs come with a junk mail filter of some kind, although the accuracy of the filters varies with the different tricks that spammers use to evade the filters and get their messages into our inboxes rather than into the junk mail filter where they belong. A vast proportion of today’s email is spam, sadly, and despite promises by Bill Gates to figure out a way to eradicate it, little has happened beyond an escalating war between spammers and email filtering companies. Please read onto page 2. << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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