TRIVIAL PURSUITS: When was the first Internet spam message sent?

But, when was the first Internet spam message sent?

According to a history of spam by Time magazine, though it wasn’t called spam until the 1980s, the first unsolicited messages came over the wires as early as 1864, when telegraph lines were used to send dubious investment offers to wealthy Americans.

The first modern spam was sent on ARPANET, the military computer network that preceded the Internet. In 1978, a man named Gary Turk sent an e-mail solicitation to 400 people, advertising his line of new computers. According to Time, Turk later said his methods proved so unpopular that it would be more than a decade before anyone would try again.