Eclectical Engineering

May 2, 1978 … thirty years ago … James Earl Carter was President of the United States, the Soviet Union was still in business (and poised to launch itself into a tar-baby war in Afghanistan, with a young Osama bin Laden as a foot-soldier in the U.S.-backed opposition), the VW Beetle sedan had just gone off sale in the U.S., and a couple of California boys named Jobs and Wozniak had begun selling something called an “Apple ][” to nerdy hobbyists who could afford to drop $1295 to taste the dubious benefits of a “home computer” (I couldn’t afford one — I was a freshman engineering student at the time, and the price worked out to about three times my tuition). Oh, and yes — 2 May 1978 was also the Pink Letter Date on which the very first spam e-mail got sent. While no one is exactly celebrating this anniversary, quite a few news outlets are at any rate commemorating it, these including National Public Radio. There’s also an extensive history of the message (and the responses to it) posted at templetons.com.

A bit of background: In those days, computing pioneer Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was the most visible and successful seller of minicomputers (which were considered “mini” because they could fit in one room rather than taking up an entire floor). A young DEC sales rep named Gary Thuerk decided to use ARPAnet (the Pentagon-run precursor to today’s public internet) to send out invitations to a couple of California-area demos of DEC’s latest, the DEC-20 system.

Thuerk and his staff pored through the printed directory of ARPAnet users (imagine it — all the e-mail addresses in the world bound into a single phone-book-style volume) and extracted several hundred addresses that appeared to be in the geographic vicinity of the upcoming dog-and-pony shows. Thuerk then had a colleague type up, address, and send the message. Unfortunately, the mail program used (called SNDMSG) could not support more than 320 addresses on the to-line, so at least a third of these spilled out into the message body (and these parties never received their copies).

Quite a few ARPAnet users apparently complained about this blatantly commercial use of what was, after all, a government facility to be used only for military business and related research. One outfit even claimed that the “bulk” mailing had crashed their mail host (although it was later shown that they were sent only three copies of the message).

ARPAnetters hotly debated the Thuerk message amongst themselves, eventually leading to some words between DARPA (the DoD agency coordinating the ARPAnet) and DEC. One Major Raymond Czahor of DARPA may have established himself as the very first BOFH (“Bastard Operator from Hell”) with a terse public response that included the following (note the early use of “shout caps,” as in the original Gary Thuerk message):

THIS WAS A FLAGRANT VIOLATION OF THE USE OF ARPANET AS THE NETWORK IS TO BE USED FOR OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT BUSINESS ONLY. APPROPRIATE ACTION IS BEING TAKEN TO PRECLUDE ITS OCCURRENCE AGAIN.

On the other hand, one Richard Stallman, an ARPAnet user at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was less critical. Stallman (who would later earn fame for spearheading the open-source software movement by founding the GNU project) observed, somewhat prophetically:

Would a dating service for people on the net be "frowned upon" by DCA? I hope not. But even if it is, don't let that stop you from notifying me via net mail if you start one.

In a followup posting, after Stallman actually saw the Thuerk message (he was not on the original mailing list for it), he admitted that he did in fact find the message abusive, but only because it had so many addresses in the header.

The Thuerk message was quite tame by the modern standards of legit marketing mail (let alone those of spam), but the strong reaction to it set a precedent against such uses of the net that lasted a decade or more, well into the era of the public (non-DARPA) internet. Leaving aside the problem of misuse of a government resource for commercial purposes, the objections to Mr. Thuerk’s message boiled down to two issues, which will seem very familiar to modern anti-spammers:

1. The address list for the message was collected through relatively random harvesting (by geography, in this case), rather than through careful pre-screening or opt-in methods.
2. The message itself was not in conformance to the recognized protocols and practices of the time.

In the years that followed, DEC found itself outgunned by a new generation of microcomputers (starting perhaps with that pesky Apple ][), and eventually was absorbed by PC-maker Compaq, which was itself taken over by Hewlett Packard. Mr Thuerk remains on staff at HP, acknowledging his role in Spam Zero with good humor, but insisting that he felt he had done nothing wrong (indeed, he even told a Wall Street Journal blog that the message may have germinated some $12 million in sales). I’d say his sin was far from venal, although he certainly appears to have lent standing room on his shoulders for subsequent and more pernicious generations of spammers.

By the way, no one called Thuerk’s message “spam” at the time — the term would not come into currency for unwanted e-mail until almost two decades later.