Denise Griffitts - Your Partner In Success!

The earliest documented spam (although the term had not yet been coined) was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent by Gary Thuerk to 393 recipients on ARPANET on May 3, 1978. Rather than send a separate message to each person, which was the standard practice at the time, he had an assistant, Carl Gartley, write a single mass email. As the marketing manager at Digital, he was hoping to get attention, particularly from West Coast customers, for Digital's new T-series of VAX systems. Instead, he ended up getting crowned, for better or worse, as the 'Father of Spam'. He prefers to think of himself as the father of e-marketing. There's a difference.  In fact, Thuerk's original spam "did work," he says. "We sold $13 million or $14 million worth" of the DEC machines through that e-mail campaign. On the negative side, complaints started coming in almost immediately, and a few days after the original e-mail, an ARPANET representative c