Today in History—May 3: The World’s First Spam Email Is Sent

On this day in 1978, a marketing manager for a Massachusetts computer company unknowingly made history: He sent the first spam email.

The Internet as we know it did not yet exist. But ARPANET, an experimental computer network that connected government-supported research sites in the United States, was up and running—albeit with a much, much smaller audience than the Internet has now. There was an actual printed directory of ARPANET users—all 2,600 of them.

Gary Thuerk, of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), was pondering how to advertise upcoming demonstrations in California of his company’s latest computers. In a moment of inspiration, he decided to send an invitation, which also touted the products, via ARPANET to about 400 people on the West Coast he found in the directory.

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The response, as one might expect, was not particularly favorable, with DEC being chided by ARPANET users who did not think that the network should be used for sending bulk messages of that nature. Thuerk’s boss made him promise to never do that again.

And yet, some 40 recipients of Thuerk’s message did attend DEC’s California product demos, with Thuerk estimating that the company made more than $12 million in sales.

A promising new sales strategy was born.

Or not. The practice of sending unsolicited emails in bulk didn’t take off until much later, after the Internet became widely used by the general public. The first intentional sales spam email was sent in 1994. Now, of course, spam emails are as ubiquitous as they are reviled.

So why is it called “spam”? The non-meat use of the term came from the online chat room community, which by the late 1980s was already using it to denote a mass influx of data into their chat rooms that could trigger a computer crash and/or annoy chat room users.

They had taken the name from a now-infamous 1970s Monty Python’s Flying Circus sketch in which a group of Vikings in a restaurant sings a chorus about SPAM meat product, chanting the product’s name repeatedly and drowning out all other conversation.

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