According to the Washington Post, yesterday marked thirty years since the first spam message was sent out. Computer salesman Gary Thuerk was kind enough to grace Arpanet users with the following on May 3, 1978…

"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."

Spam, you’ve come a long way baby. My Gmail account currently has over 4,300 messages in the Spam folder and of the 96 messages that are in my inbox, about half of them are unsolicited.