Gary Thuerk, Father of Spam

It was 1978. The internet was not yet past its awkward stage, and it was still known as the ARPAnet. Gary had an opportunity to market his new DEC processors and he had a list of 400 ARPAnet emails. So he sent the first mass commercial mailings.

From Computerworld here:

Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corp., sent his first mass e-mailing on May 1, 1978 to 400 customers over the Arpanet, hoping to get attention, particularly from West Coast customers, for Digital’s new T-series of VAX systems.

Instead, he ended up getting crowned, for better or worse, as the father of spam.

Thuerk’s original spam “did work,” he says. “We sold $13 million or $14 million worth” of the DEC machines through that e-mail campaign, Thuerk notes. On the negative side, “complaints started coming in almost immediately,” he adds. A few days after the original e-mail, Thuerk recalls, an ARPAnet representative “called me up and chewed me out. He made me promise never to do it again.”

Of the some 400 e-mails Thuerk sent out, he received only a few complaints. “The best complaint came from a guy at the University of Utah, who said when he got in the office in the morning, he couldn’t use his computer because the spam had used up all his company’s disk space.“

Not only did Gary discover SPAM, but he also discovered the first denial of service attack via email, AKA the “mail bomb.” Its hard to believe that a text file with 400 email addresses would fill up an ancient disk drive, but I guess those things happened. Its also unbelievable that he was able to sell millions in upgrades. I guess each computer back then cost several or hundreds of thousands of dollars.