Today's date is considered the birthday of spam - the headache of the owners of electronic mailboxes, due to the fact that on that day in 1978 the first officially registered unwanted advertising message was sent. And although spam - obsessive advertising sent to subscribers without their permission, appeared almost forty years ago, but only in the 1990s, during the era of mass Internet distribution, the world learned the true scale of the "natural disaster" into which spam turned. This name was given to "electronic garbage" in 1993 by the system administrator Usenet Joel Fehr. The first spam message to 400 recipients was sent out on May 3, 1978 by DEC, a non-existent electronic equipment company, which thus decided to market its new mini-computers. The announcement was sent over the Arpanet network, which was the forerunner of the modern Internet.
Arpanet was created in 1968 by order of the US Department of Defense as a means of transmitting information in the event of an atomic war. Initially, it was connected to several leading universities in the state of California, but soon the network spread to the whole Western world. Arpanet ceased to exist in 1990, when it was finally technically obsolete. The name "SPAM" (SPiced hAM) is a brand of canned meat - spicy sausage ground meat from pork. After the Second World War, at a time when the card system operated on the British Isles, SPAM was one of the few meat products that were on sale.
According to statistics, up to 85% of all electronic messages sent on the Internet are spam, unnecessary information. (Photo: TijanaM, Shutterstock) In 1970, a comedy appeared on British television screens, in which a cafe was shown, where all dishes were prepared from " SPAM ", which was heavily imposed on customers. So these canned food became a symbol of importunate advertising.
Now spam, according to experts, has grown into a whole powerful shadow industry, sending out over a hundred billion electronic messages a day, many of which contain computer viruses. According to statistics, up to 85% of all electronic messages sent on the Internet are spam, unnecessary information. A significant number of such letters are sent by high-tech gangs through computers captured by viruses. Spam is widely used to carry out a wide variety of criminal, fraudulent transactions, including theft of information about bank accounts.
