Email Inventor Never Expected Spam
Although plenty of criminals have embraced spam, and corrupted thousands of machines to send out billions of messages, there was a time when spamming was unthinkable.
Long before Tim Berners-Lee and Mosaic and AOL, and other points in Internet history, the humble email came into existence during the summer of 1971. Ray Tomlinson sent a message from one machine to another in the same room.
He recently told the Times Online the idea of spam would have been unthinkable in the early days, when no more than a thousand people had email.