What product was advertised in the first spam email?

The first spam email advertised DEC computers. On May 3, 1978, Digital Equipment Corporation marketing representative Gary Thuerk sent an unsolicited message promoting a DEC product presentation to people on ARPANET.

Thuerk’s mailing list contained roughly 400 recipients, although accounts of the incident vary because ARPANET’s systems could not deliver the message to everyone he intended. At the time, ARPANET had only about 2,600 users, so the campaign reached an unusually large share of the network.

The message promoted a presentation for DEC’s new computing systems in California. It was not called “spam” then; that term became associated with unsolicited bulk electronic messages later. The episode is widely regarded as the first known commercial spam email.

The common mix-up is to answer with a rival technology company such as IBM, Apple, or Microsoft. None of those companies’ products were advertised in this landmark message. The advertiser was DEC, formally Digital Equipment Corporation, a major computer company later acquired by Compaq in 1998.