spam

I’ve told the big Netcom stories; you know how I got there and you’ve heard about my brush with history. This post contains a bunch more that aren’t really big enough to hang an entire article on. My first day at Netcom, everyone was freaking out. It felt like the sky was falling. When someone slowed down enough to explain what was going on, I decided the freak out was justified. Back in those early days of the Internet, nobody had realized that you could just send bulk messages to as many people as possible on the theory that some small percentage of them would reply. Commercial spam hadn’t been invented — in fact, people were a little bit dubious that asking people to pay for an Internet account made sense. ...