Washington, D.C. (AHN) - It all began 30 years ago today. The mother lode of all spam - the bane of everyone's online existence - was first sent out via the U.S. Defense Department's Arpanet by a salesman named Gary Thuerk.
The first junk mail or "Spam" as we know it today, was an invitation for a demo of the new system-20 mini computers being marketed by the Digital Equipment Corp.
Thuerk was the ingenious salesman who thought of "mailing" the invite to 393 users on Arpanet, the predecessor of today's Internet, much to the consternation of the recipients -- who happened to be top officials of the U.S. military and university researchers.
Thuerk immediately lost his job in May 1978, but it wasn't until 1993 that unsolicited emails were christened "spam" by Usenet chat system administrator Joel Furr.
BBC News reported that Furr's epiphany was inspired by a Monty Python sketch on processed meat which ended with a group of Vikings chanting: "Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam."
