World's first spam message

Do you know that the first-ever unsolicited bulk email was sent by someone at a computer firm known as DEC in the United States on 3 May 1978 to invite users to attend an open day in which the firm would be showing off its latest range of computers? That's almost 30 years ago.

Poor guy. He couldn't even get his email right when he spammed every West Coast user on the Arpanet. The email addresses overflowed into the body of the message. And the reaction to that spam message? Complaints, complaints and more complaints from the recipients who claimed that the system was being abused. So what else is new today? (The Arpanet was the original building block of the Internet.)