The first instance of a spoiler alert in email, (and the first example of an email digest) dates to the original release of the first star trek movie 7 December 1979. (the motionless picture). The sf-lovers@mit-ai list had just celebrated its first year of operation. (none of this host.domain.tla stuff, there were only 256 slots in the host table, and MIT-AI was a KA-10, running ITS)
Roger Duffy, at the time, a humble, bearded, grad student, showed up at the lab that evening, and noticed that the mailer was running all the time, and local email wasn't getting delivered. He dug into the queue, (this was ITS after all, it wasn't going to stop him) and found it full of messages to the mailing list, including some spoilers (unmarked).
Since a lot of time got consumed with the initial handshake, sending one big message would be faster than the same sent as a bunch of little ones. Digests got invented. A bit of emacs hacking, (the original TECO version), and he had a basic set of digest creation macro's. He collected a batch of messages, and moved all the spoilers to the end of the digest, adding a big warning before the start of the messages. He even did a table of contents, and spell checked all the submissions, a job he was stuck with for the next several months.
On The History and Use of "Spoiler Alert"
The first instance of a spoiler alert in email, (and the first example of an email digest) dates to the original release of the first star trek movie 7 December 1979. (the motionless picture). The sf-lovers@mit-ai list had just celebrated its first year of operation. (none of this host.domain.tla stuff, there were only 256 slots in the host table, and MIT-AI was a KA-10, running ITS)
Roger Duffy, at the time, a humble, bearded, grad student, showed up at the lab that evening, and noticed that the mailer was running all the time, and local email wasn't getting delivered. He dug into the queue, (this was ITS after all, it wasn't going to stop him) and found it full of messages to the mailing list, including some spoilers (unmarked).
Since a lot of time got consumed with the initial handshake, sending one big message would be faster than the same sent as a bunch of little ones. Digests got invented. A bit of emacs hacking, (the original TECO version), and he had a basic set of digest creation macro's. He collected a batch of messages, and moved all the spoilers to the end of the digest, adding a big warning before the start of the messages. He even did a table of contents, and spell checked all the submissions, a job he was stuck with for the next several months.