All of this talk about "Spam" peeked my desire to get smarter and find out why the Spam I knew as a child became the SPAM we all know and love(??) today.
Wikipedia says "The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch was set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. As the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM... lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM," hence "SPAMming" the dialogue.
The excessive amount of SPAM mentioned in the sketch is a reference to British rationing during World War II. SPAM was one of the few foods that was widely available.
Although the first known instance of unsolicited commercial e-mail occurred in 1978 unsolicited electronic messaging had already taken place over other media, with the first recorded instance being via telegram on September 13, 1904, the term "spam" for this practice had not yet been applied. In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat "SPAM" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen. In early Chat rooms services like PeopleLink and the early days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python Spam sketch. This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It was also used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting -- for instance, Star Wars fans often invaded Star Trek chat rooms, filling the space with blocks of text until the Star Trek fans left.This act, previously called flooding or trashing, came to be known as spamming. The term was soon applied to a large amount of text broadcasted by many users.
It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message.
The first usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. This use had also become established—to spam Usenet was flooding newsgroups with junk messages.
Way to go, Joel...Hmmmm ...Does that make him the "Father of SPAM"....
And now, as Paul Harvey would say, you know the rest of the story.
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