Thirty years ago today, the first unsolicited commercial e-mail went out over the research network that was the Internet's predecessor - and the modern aggravation of spam was born.
That e-mail, sent to advertise a new machine from the now-defunct computer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC), was swiftly and forcefully condemned by the tiny community of engineers developing the Arpanet, or Advanced Research Projects Agency network, named after the Defense Department office that funded the project.
"It was rather an insult to one's sensibilities to have an obvious commercial message sent out over a research network," said computer scientist Peter Neumann of SRI in Menlo Park, who was one of the 393 recipients of that primordial spam.
But the Arpanet was small and tightly controlled by defense and think-tank scientists like Neumann, and this early e-mail insult was not so much the beginning of the deluge but merely a hint of things to come, according to Internet pioneer Brad Templeton, who today is chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group.
"This was a spam, though the term would not be used to refer to it for another 15 years," Templeton wrote in a Web-based history titled "Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978," which may well be the definitive work on this dastardly deed.
In a recent telephone interview, Templeton offered a short version of the sad history of spam. He quickly pushed the clock forward to the 1980s, by which time the Internet had evolved into a university-driven network - that's when former Vice President Al Gore got involved. And then Templeton moved the story ahead to the early 1990s when Tim Berners-Lee laid the groundwork for the user-friendly World Wide Web.
According to Templeton, in April 1994, when regular people started logging on to cyberspace, two immigration attorneys, Laurence A. Canter and Martha S. Siegel, more or less reinvented spam. They did so by posting an unsolicited advertisement for legal services on thousands of Internet-based electronic bulletin boards called the Usenet.
That advertisement caused an uproar, in part because it flew in the face of the noncommercial ethic that still prevailed in cyberspace, and even more so because Canter and Siegel, far from being apologetic, wrote a book titled "How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway."
Interviewed by the New York Times in October 1994, Siegel painted their ad as commercial free speech and criticized their detractors as one of two types of crybaby: "There are the wild-eyed zealots who view the Internet as their home. ... To them it's become a womb, practically. ... The other group is people like Wired magazine, who want to be the people who make money off it," she said.
Templeton said it was the Canter-Siegel message and the ensuing uproar that catapulted unwanted electronic messages into everyday life.
His research also suggests that the term "spam" originated during the late 1980s when "multi-user dungeons" or MUDs came into being as chat and role-playing programs. According to Templeton, the inspiration for the term was a skit by Monty Python's Flying Circus involving a restaurant that serves what Hormel Foods Corp. calls spiced ham, or Spam.
How did this brand-name canned meat come to be used as a term of derision on MUDs? It was apparently something of a mischievous sport amongst these MUDers to flood the databases of rivals with electronic trash. Templeton said this action was named after the Spam song from the Monty Python skit in which the performers sing, "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam" until told to shut up.
So by the time Canter and Siegel declared their right to send any electronic message to anyone, the word "spam" already existed as a label of disapproval. "This spam made newspapers. It made them famous," Templeton wrote in a second history: "Origin of the term 'spam' to mean net abuse."
Fast-forward again to the present and the sad fact is that, annoying or not, spamming proved so effective for the senders that it quickly grew from the occasional annoyance to the everyday aggravation of everyone with an e-mail address.
"If I don't do something, I get 200 to 300 spam messages a day," said Sara Radicati, whose Palo Alto consulting group tracks e-mail, instant messaging and other forms of electronic communications.
The estimated cost of spam is far too squishy a number to be worthwhile, she said. But her firm, the Radicati Group, recently published a report that estimates that 78 percent of the 210 billion messages sent worldwide each day are unsolicited.
Today, network administrators, Internet service providers and other users employ a variety of programs to filter out some of this unsolicited traffic that keeps increasing as spammers find new ways to flood the Internet with unwanted alerts.
"The rate of delivery of spam is dropping a bit," said Radicati, who estimates that about 93 billion spam messages still get through the defenses every day.
"There's going to be an arms race forever," Templeton said.
