In the spring of 1978, an energetic marketing man named Gary Thuerk wanted to let
people in the technology world know that his company, the Digital Equipment Corporation, was about to introduce a powerful new computer system. DEC operated out of an old wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, and was well known on the East Coast, but Thuerk hoped to reach the technological community in California as well. He decided that the best way to do it was through the
network of government and university computers then known as the Arpanet. Only a few thousand people
used it regularly, but their names were conveniently printed in a single directory. After selecting six hundred West Coast addresses, Thuerk realized that he would never have time to call each one of them, or even to send out hundreds of individual messages. Then another idea occurred to him: what if he simply used the network to dispatch a single e-mail to
all of them? “We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSystem-20 family,’’ the message read. As historic lines go, it didn’t have quite the ring of “One small step for a man,” yet Gary Thuerk’s impact cannot be disputed. When he pushed the send button, he became the father of spam. The reaction was immediate and almost completely hostile. “This was a flagrant violation of the Arpanet,’’ one recipient wrote. Another noted that “advertising of particular
products” should be strongly discouraged on the network. The system administrator promised to respond at once, and Thuerk was harshly reprimanded. Nevertheless, his company sold more than twenty of the computer systems, for a million dollars apiece. Thuerk saw no harm in his actions; he and others viewed the network as an emerging symbol of intellectual freedom. Even if unsolicited e-mail became a nuisance, a greater danger would be posed by placing limits on how this powerful new tool could be deployed. “The amount of harm done by any of the cited ‘unfair’ things the net has been used for is clearly very small,’’ the Internet pioneer Richard Stallman wrote a few days after the DEC e-mail. Stallman opposed any action that would interfere with the aggressive openness that came to define the Web. And he still does. In his message about the DEC spam, Stallman pointed out—three decades before the appearance of Craigs-list and Monster.com—that the network provided a unique opportunity to advertise jobs and an entirely new way to sell products. He went even further: “Would a dating service on the net be ‘frowned upon’ . . . ? I hope not. But even if it is, don’t let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.” I have no idea whether anyone on the Arpanet tried to
help Stallman find a date, but thousands of people have tried to help me. In the past few weeks, I have received several e-mails from the Dating Adult Friend line, and several dozen from a site called Adult Friend Finder. In addition, there were fourteen messages from someone calling himself Damian Dominques, who offered, repeatedly, to help me meet “delicious babes.” I also received fairly unambiguous invitations for personal interaction from people named Antonia, Heather, Helen, Joyce, Olivia, Kelly, Sally, Sophie, and Sue, among dozens of others. from the issue cartoon bank e-mail this Wading through dating-service spam is a minor inconvenience compared to dealing with advertisements for products designed to help those dates succeed. I received three hundred and seventeen pieces of mail offering, through surgical, mechanical, and, above all, pharmaceutical means, to help “fatten” my “love muscle,” as one of them put it. There were also several hundred solicitations for low- and no-interest car loans, automatic mortgage approvals, sleeping pills, dubious heart medicines, diet aids, gastric bypass surgery, contact lenses, air-conditioning systems, watches, online casinos, laptops, high-definition television sets, bootleg software, and jobs that promised to let me work at home, do practically nothing, and earn millions of dollars. In all, last month my three principal e-mail addresses pulled in 4,321 messages that went straight into various spam folders. Another hundred or so made it to my in-box.