Today marks 30 years since the birth of that never-ending electronic mail everyone loathes to see in their inbox. Originally called flooding or trashing, spam has grown from a 1978 mass e-mail to a 2008 worldwide nuisance.

The first spammer was Gary Thuerk, a salesman for computer firm Digital Electronic Corp. (DEC). Thuerk recognized that the academics, engineers and scientists connected through an electronic network called the Arpanet. His first spam read;

“We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSYSTEM-20 family at the two product presentations we will be giving in California this month.” (To read the full message click here)

As you can imagine, people weren’t too thrilled to be getting an advertisement on their email, especially given the fact that APRANET was meant to be for ‘official US Government business’ at the time.