I don't know if it is worth a birthday cake, but today is the 15th anniversary of the use of the word "spam" to describe unsolicited bulk electronic communications. The term is thought to have been coined by Joel Furr, an administrator on the net discussion system Usenet. He used "spam" to describe bulk postings on discussion boards. It took a few years for the term to be applied generally to bulk email.
It is hard to believe that 15 years ago, the word "spam" only referred to certain processed luncheon meat and a Monty Python skit. In the skit, a group of Vikings, who were at a restaurant that only served spam, start singing: "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM..., Spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam."
Next month, it will be the 30th anniversary of the first recorded unsolicited email. It was sent by 3 May 1978, when Gary Thuerk, an aggressive DEC (Digital Equipment Corp., my former employer) marketer who thought Arpanet users would find it cool that DEC had integrated Arpanet protocol support directly into the new DEC-20 and TOPS-20 OS. He sent the email to every Arpanet user on the U.S. West Coast. More on that in May!
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