Slashdot Mirror
39 Years Ago The World's First Spam Was Sent (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader write:
Wednesday was the 39th anniversary of the world's first spam, sent by Gary Thuerk, a marketer for Massachusetts' Digital Equipment Corporation in 1978 to over 300 users on Arpanet. It was written in all capital letters, and its body began with 273 more email addresses that wouldn't fit in the header. The DEC marketer "was reportedly trying to flag the attention of the burgeoning California tech community," reports the San Jose Mercury News. The message touted two demonstrations of the DECSYSTEM-20, a PDP-10 mainframe computer.
An official at the Defense Communication Agency immediately called it "a flagrant violation of the use of Arpanet as the network is to be used for official U.S. government business only," adding "Appropriate action is being taken to preclude its occurence again." But at the time a 24-year-old Richard Stallman -- then a graduate student at MIT -- claimed he wouldn't have reminded receiving the message...until someone forwarded him a copy. Stallman then responded "I eat my words... Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about." The article reports that today the spam industry earns about $200 million each year, while $20 billion is spent trying to block spam. And the New York Times even has a quote from the DEC employee who sent that first spam. "People either say, 'Wow! You sent the first spam!' or they act like I gave them cooties."
An official at the Defense Communication Agency immediately called it "a flagrant violation of the use of Arpanet as the network is to be used for official U.S. government business only," adding "Appropriate action is being taken to preclude its occurence again." But at the time a 24-year-old Richard Stallman -- then a graduate student at MIT -- claimed he wouldn't have reminded receiving the message...until someone forwarded him a copy. Stallman then responded "I eat my words... Nobody should be allowed to send a message with a header that long, no matter what it is about." The article reports that today the spam industry earns about $200 million each year, while $20 billion is spent trying to block spam. And the New York Times even has a quote from the DEC employee who sent that first spam. "People either say, 'Wow! You sent the first spam!' or they act like I gave them cooties."
Yup. Eternal September was the beginning of the tidal wave that changed the net forever. Usenet is no longer what it once was, and the net is a little bit lesser since the days of Kibo, Ludwig Plutomium, alt.folklore.urban, Seder Argic, Ted Frank, Joel Furr and the Green Card Spamming t shirts, et. al. I sold stuff to folks all over the globe on a simple promise to pay when they got it and never got screwed. Time and change ...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The way our email protocols were created show a total lack of consideration for this type of bad behavior. If it happened on Arpanet, it should have been fixed by the time it became Darpanet. This shows a real lack of foresight in the creation of SMTP (in 1982).
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.