01-19-2005, 09:26 PM
It all started with Monty Python
A famous Monty Python skit revolved around a restaurant specializing in dishes involving lots of Spam. A group of Vikings sitting in the corner would sing Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam. Wonderful Spam!, drowning out the waitress and all conversation in the restaurant.
Then spam visited MUD communities
Since unsolicited email is seen as drowning out all other communication, it made sense to call it spam (with a lowercase "s" to differentiate it from the Hormel meat product). At least it made sense in the 1980s to users in the MUD (multiuser dungeon) community.
This community is a multiperson shared environment where people chat, use objects created in the environment, and interact in different MUD locations. When a computer was flooded with too much information, it was called spamming. Another term was "to spam the database," which referred to the computer creating a large number of objects, instead of objects being created by hand within the community.
The first famous spam
In 1994 the first large-scale spamming occurred with the infamous Green Card spam. Two attorneys trying to drum up some clients hired a programmer to flood every USENET newsgroup with this letter. This unsolicited email made people so angry that recipients began referring to it as spam.
Today, not even 10 years later, the term "spam" is so common that it's listed as a definition in the dictionary.
A famous Monty Python skit revolved around a restaurant specializing in dishes involving lots of Spam. A group of Vikings sitting in the corner would sing Spam, Spam, Spam, lovely Spam. Wonderful Spam!, drowning out the waitress and all conversation in the restaurant.
Then spam visited MUD communities
Since unsolicited email is seen as drowning out all other communication, it made sense to call it spam (with a lowercase "s" to differentiate it from the Hormel meat product). At least it made sense in the 1980s to users in the MUD (multiuser dungeon) community.
This community is a multiperson shared environment where people chat, use objects created in the environment, and interact in different MUD locations. When a computer was flooded with too much information, it was called spamming. Another term was "to spam the database," which referred to the computer creating a large number of objects, instead of objects being created by hand within the community.
The first famous spam
In 1994 the first large-scale spamming occurred with the infamous Green Card spam. Two attorneys trying to drum up some clients hired a programmer to flood every USENET newsgroup with this letter. This unsolicited email made people so angry that recipients began referring to it as spam.
Today, not even 10 years later, the term "spam" is so common that it's listed as a definition in the dictionary.
![[Image: 723475742_8cb2b0be6c.jpg]](http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1019/723475742_8cb2b0be6c.jpg)