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Forty Years of Spam Email (bbc.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC has a video celebrating the 40th birthday of spam email. Here's a transcript of the video: "It is 40 years since the first spam email was sent. Marketer Gary Thuerk composed an email selling his company's newest computers and sent it to 400 users on ARPANET, which was the network that become the basis for the internet. Why is it called spam? It has been suggested that it was called spam after a song in a Monty Python sketch. Where patrons of a cafe were repeatedly offered something they didn't want. The concept of spam is nothing new. Unsolicited telegrams were sent over 100 years ago and we've come to accept junk mail as part of everyday life. Now [nearly 60%] of all email is spam. Like most rubbish, it can be found everywhere on earth."
I am not one of the privileged few who was on ARPANET in 1978: I was at high school and in the wrong country.
I was, however, present for a somewhat later milestone in spam history: the green card lottery spam. On 12 April 2994, a pair of exceptionally unscrupulous lawyers spammed every newsgroup on Usenet with ads for (utterly unnecessary and very expensive) assistance in entering a lottery for USA green card (permanent residence.) This generated a great deal of internet hatred.
https://www.wired.com/1999/04/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
It is the credits at the end.
Just watch the credits roll and you see the word "Spam" inserted everywhere.
Just like the junk messages littering you inbox, interspersed with the real messages.
Written and spam performed by:
Spam Terry Jones
Michael Spam Palin
John Spam John Spam
John Spam Cleese
Graham Spam Spam
Spam Chapman
etc..
Usenet was started in 1980. The first well known Usenet spam was posted in 1994 (the Green Card Lottery). The email referenced by the BBC was sent in 1978, well before the infamous first Usenet spam.