Spam turns 80; spam turns 40.
On this auspicious occasion, wemark the birth of unsolicited, loathsome junk email
Happy birthday to spam! No, we’re not talking about the classic routine from “Monty Python.” Instead, we are referring to the nearly 40th anniversary of the birth of the bane of modern existence that is unsolicited bulk email.
Coincidentally, SPAM, the much maligned canned meat, is also marking a momentous birthday this year, turning 80. Salutations all around. Sort of.
Indeed, some tech experts suspect that junk email may have derived its colorful moniker from the uber mystery
meat. Perhaps because they are both very effective at clogging things up.
“Think about the name,” said Chris Garcia, curator of Mountain View’s Computer History Museum, “It conjures up this very specific image of something that none of us really likes but everyone always has around.”
Sound the trumpets. Almost 40 years ago, on May 1, 1978, Gary Thuerk, a marketer for Massachusetts’ Digital Equipment Corporation, wrote the very first email advertising message to more than 400 users of the system called Arpanet, an early iteration of the internet. He was reportedly trying to flag the attention of the burgeoning California tech community. He hit send a few days later. As you might suspect, the backlash was almost instantaneous.
As the New York Times noted, one of the lucky few to receive this inaugural blast of junk email instantly damned it as “a flagrant abuse” of the directory. Another user, Richard Stallman, who initially believed himself to be cheated by not having received this flashy new dispatch, had someone else forward it to him. He was left to ponder his massive feelings of regret in leisure, noting, “I eat my words.”
In the four decades since, the rest of the world has come to bitterly share those sentiments as our bulging inboxes and our shrinking mental bandwidth has been smothered in endless gigabytes of such nuisance correspondence. Thuerk has come to be hailed by the dubious distinction of the father of spam.
“Spam has certainly — and insidiously — worked its way into our lives,” says Scot Guenter, professor of American studies at San Jose State. “How much time does each of us spend each day checking safeguards to keep it out, deleting the ones that still get into our various feeds?”
Estimated by some to be an almost $200 million industry, the advent of spam has transformed our usage of email and our digital lives. Once a novelty, spam has become a plague that has spread from the original source of infection (email) to a host of other media from cellphones to instant messages, as Wired has opined. No matter where you try to hide, spam is coming to get you.
As we have become ever more addicted to our devices, the insult of spam has begun to feel even more personal and irritating, experts say. “Our phone is our home, it’s where we live, it’s how connect to family and friends,” said Garcia. “With the deluge of spam, we feel like we are being constantly invaded by this superannoying force.”
Many have come to regard the email scourge as an evil of the modern age. An estimated $20 billion is spent every year in the battle against spam, in the U.S. alone.
Among the most memorable of the multitude of genres of spam is the classic Nigerian prince ruse. In this notorious gimmick, a member of the aristocracy offers to pay you a large sum of dough on the condition that you help them smuggle it out of the country. Related canons of spam include the dating scams, the lottery tricks and the stuck parcel ruse.
Good times.