2004 March : Mike Little’s Journalized

Mike Little’s not-quite-so-daily thoughts, babblings, and random synapse firings!

A collection of random thoughts and links. Nothing too exciting. ;-) -- Mike Little

Friday, 5 March 2004

Spam’s Tenth (-ish) Birthday

by mike @ 22:09. Filed under

Geek Stuff

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!

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jour·nal n. A personal record of occurrences, experiences, and reflections kept on a regular basis; a diary.