Eight years ago, Laurence Canter outraged the purists by firing off a mass commercial solicitation on Usenet news groups to promote his law firm. The Internet has never been the same.
Summary: In the early 1990s, facing increased pressure from the commercial sector who sensed there might be some value in the nascent ?Internet,? the National Science Foundation began easing informal restrictions on commercial activity over the Internet. This gave rise to the earliest internet companies but also to spam. Before the World Wide Web…