Today (5 March) marks the tenth anniversary of what is generally considered the first spam message.
On this day in 1994, US law firm Canter and Siegel posted a message on several Usenet newsgroups advertising their services to people interested in participating in the US Green Card lottery.
That date (5 March 1994) is only a couple of months before my very first personal internet email. I got my first ISP account (although we didn’t call them that back then) with Demon Internet around June 1994. I still have that email somewhere!
I had been online for few years before that via FidoNet. I think I must have first gone online in 1986 or ’87.
Interestingly, Brad Templeton has evidence of much earlier spam, though the term wasn’t used then; 26 years ago in fact.
And he has a nice piece on the history of the term spam, again, going back much further than 10 years.
PS: Let’s not forget this!
Short link to this post: https://z1.tl/cs
