Gary Thuerk sends the first "spam" email - May 3rd, 1978

On this day in 1978, marketing manager Gary Thuerk sent the first unsolicited mass email, or as it’s better known today, “spam.”

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class as a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that proves there's more than one way to
make history. I'm Gabe Lousier, and in this episode, we're
talking about the fateful day when spam email was unleashed

(00:21):
on unsuspecting inboxes all across the virtual world. The day
was May three, eight. Marketing manager Gary Thirk sent the
first unsolicited mass email, or as it's better known today, spam.

(00:46):
The message advertised the latest computers on offer from Thirk's employer,
the Digital Equipment Corporation or d e C. As a marketer,
Thirk wanted to get his product in front of his
many put entil buyers as possible, But in the late
nineteen seventies, the average consumer wasn't in the market for
their own computing system. After all, the Internet didn't exist yet,

(01:10):
and it would be another two decades before most Americans
had their own email addresses. At the time, there were
only about twenty hundred people in the country who could
send and receive electronic mail. They did so through a
secure government funded network called ARPA Net, a research project
open primarily to Defense Department employees. And researchers. Thirk had

(01:34):
a hunch this group might be interested in his product,
so he sent an ad to three hundred and ninety
seven ARPA net addresses, along with an invitation to attend
a product demonstration. This early example of e marketing proved
to be a huge success. Thirk later claimed it brought
in about thirteen million dollars in sales. On the downside, though,

(01:58):
he was immediately hit with numerous complaints from our Ponette users,
including a researcher at the University of Utah who was
unable to use his computer because the spam emails had
taken up all his company's disk space. Thirk also received
a harsh scolding from the government and ar Bonnette representative
called him soon after the email blast, and, as Thirk

(02:21):
put it, quote, he chewed me out and made me
promise never to do it again. Gary Thirk may have
invented spam, but he definitely didn't call it that. In
back then, spam meant just one thing, spiced ham, and
more specifically the canned spiced ham produced by Hormel Foods.

(02:44):
The word wouldn't be applied to junk email until about
fifteen years later, when early Internet users started referring to
online ads as spam. Despite how that might sound, the
term actually wasn't a jab at Hormel's low cost pork product. Instead,
it was a reference to a sketch from a nineteen
seventy episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus egg sausage, egg

(03:13):
and spam and bacon and spam. In the famous sketch,
a customer at a restaurant hopelessly tries to order something
that doesn't contain spam, only to learn that it's a
key ingredient and just about every item on the menu.
As the server explains the relative spam content of the

(03:34):
various dishes, the other customers begin chanting spam in approval. Bacon,
spam and sausage. It's got spamming it as much as spag,
sausage and spam. I don't. Soon the repeated word drowns
out everything else, taking up all the space on the

(03:56):
menu and all the oxygen in the room. Spake as,
I love your spam. I love it. I'm in spam, spam, spam, sam, sam, spake, base, spom,
spasmo and stay. Make of this what you will. But

(04:18):
in the early days of the Internet, Monty Python fans
made up a sizeable portion of the user base, so
in unsolicited emails began piling up in their inboxes, pushing
things they didn't want to buy. The group knew just
the word to describe that intrusive visual noise. Soon after,
spam was widely adopted as a catch all term for

(04:40):
unwanted emails, a fact that thrills Hormel to no end.
I'm sure spam email is inescapable today, but that wasn't
always the case. When Gary Thurk sent his first unsolicited ad,
it annoyed so many people that no one sent another
one for about ten years. Eventually, though, as more and

(05:01):
more people went online, spam came back and with a vengeance.
Pitching a product, a service, or a cause was suddenly
easier than ever. You didn't need a targeted list of
potential customers. You could just send your message out on
mass and see if anyone bit. Most people wouldn't respond,
but the few who did were easy money. The practice

(05:25):
became even more streamlined with the introduction of botan nets
in the early two thousands, allowing the user to send
millions more junk emails every day. Of course, Gary Thirke
had no way of knowing that his simple marketing campaign
would grow into such a wide scale public nuisance. That
is what happened, though, and as a result, he's now

(05:48):
considered the father of spam email. It's a title he
grudgingly bears, even though he doesn't think he deserves it.
In thirk size, the email blast he sent was plain
old e marketing, not spamming. The difference, according to him,
is that the majority of people who receive spam don't
want it. The senders are working from an unqualified list

(06:11):
of recipients. In contrast, the email he sent advertising computers
was highly targeted. Everyone who got it had an established
interest in computers just by virtue of being online. In
Even if you aren't swayed by Gary's reasoning, it still
isn't fair to blame him for the trillions of spam

(06:33):
emails that are now sent every year. Sure, it's a
problem that sprang from his invention, but as he aptly
pointed out himself, quote, you don't blame the right brothers
for every flying problem. Once a marketer, always a marketer.
I'm gay Bluesier and hopefully you now know a little

(06:55):
more about history today than he did yesterday. If you
want to keep up with the show, consider following us
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You can also rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts,
or you can write to us directly at this day
at I heart media dot com. Just please no spam.

(07:19):
Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show, and thank
you for listening. I'll see you back here again tomorrow
for another day in history class.