Spam Is 30 Years Old

holy_calamity writes "New Scientist commemorates spam's 30th anniversary, a week from today. The first spam message — archived here — was sent to 393 users of ARPANET on May 2, 1978 by someone from computing pioneers DEC. They had to type in all the addresses by hand first."

Comments

Stallman ---

[mingot]

Heh, nice pro spam message by RMS there.

Re:usenet spam - greencard lawyers

[Neil]

Canter and Siegel. I still remember firing up trn that morning, coming across the same off-topic message in group after group, and realizing that someone had used a newsgroups list in conjunction with a perl script or something to post the same advert to every USENET group in existence.

The mechanism was obvious as soon as you saw the results, but it seemed so obviously wrong and inappropriate "why would anyone *do* that!". The beginning of the end of the golden age ...

Not much has changed

[Noexit]

30 years later one crap message to a list can still generate dozens of messages bitching about the extra traffic and waste of resources.