If you’re hard up for a mid-afternoon sugar rush, here’s one reason to buy a cake: Spam just turned 30.

On May 3rd, 1978, the users of Arpanet — a U.S. government-run precursor to the modern Internet — logged into their accounts and found the first piece of unsolicited commercial e-mail recorded in history.

What was it for? Neither performance-enhancing drugs nor a way to make money while working part-time from home. Believe it or not, it was actually a sales pitch for a new computer. At the time, only a handful of high-level academics had the resources to afford such costly machines.

Well, a handful of high-level academics, and Gary Thuerk, a salesman. His pitch, delivered to hundreds of users, 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.”

Not long after, the users launched into what may have been the first public message board complaining about spam. One user claimed the solicitation was “a clear and flagrant abuse of the directory!”

Just to be clear, sending one message into the primitive in-boxes was “flagrant abuse,” but sending hundreds of complaints about it to everyone else was a-OK. (Thus began an Internet tradition.)

From there, e-mail spam has been costing businesses big. Ferris Research estimates that U.S. companies will spend over $42 billion protecting their systems against it in 2008 — that number’s up from only $35 billion in 2007.

But here’s the real question: Who came up with the term “spam”? The love-it-or-hate-it breakfast fare first comes to mind, and one camp of theorists suggests that a USC computer group was thinking the very same thing when they coined the term:

• Nobody wants spam or even asks for it
• No one eats it, and it’s the first thing to be pushed aside when eating the entree, and
• When you have a craving, it’s actually tasty, just like the .01% of junk mail that’s useful to some people.

We see the correlation, but it’s just a little too clever to be true. Another camp thinks it’s from Monty Python’s “Spam Song.” For anyone who’s ever heard the song, it certainly sounds like an in-box on a typical workday: an endless repetition of worthless text that no one wants to deal with.

“Spam spam spam spam, spam spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam …”

Tags: Security, Spam, Unsolicited e-mail