New Scientist is pointing out, though perhaps we didn't need to know, that spam is 30 on May 3. Lordy, yes - the first unwanted email message inviting (all) 393 Arpanet users to a product presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It's dead. Spam proved more hardy.
Usenet spam, which for a while looked like it would be the real problem, surfaced in 1994. I remember it - I wrote a few of the stories. And the book review.
One place I was wrong(ish):
[Canter & Siegel's newsgroup spam] meant users had to make more effort sorting the worthwhile messages from the rubbish. Only a tiny bit, in this case, but big oaks that obscure the view grow from little acorns planted by immigration lawyers. If every company, from tiny to huge, decides to post "For sale" and "Your chance to get rich!!" notices to every newsgroup, I for one will quickly seek out other, advertising-free sources, on or off the Net. The advertisers will have defeated themselves.
Sure, Usenet is a smoking ruin, but there are plenty of places with advertisers around where people are happy. Aren't there?
But it's been email spam - and more recently blog spam - that has been impossible to get rid of.
Anyway, the fascinating thing that the New Scientist blog post turns up is that some people have kept archives of every spam they've ever received. Apparently it's a world that's split into BV and AV - where the V stands for the brand name usually applied to sildenafil. In AV (which starts June 1998), things really took off.
Quoth NS: The best archives - like Paul Wouter's, Bruce Guenter's and Richard Jones's - stretch as far back as 1997. (There's a rather big page of spam graphs on Paul Wouter's site, from which the yearly spam pic at the top is taken.)
Pity Bill Gates turned out to be wrong in 2002 about spam being dead by 2006, eh. Which would you rather have had, though - all the spam we've got, or billg saying "told ya so"?
