The REAL SPAM Story

"...Lest We Forget!...

Well, maybe that's a little too dramatic. How about this: A generation is now growing up that doesn't know the true origin of the term SPAM® as applied to bulk email.

Yeah; that's more like it!

It it my sincere hope that the interesting little history behind this use of the word SPAM® is not forgotten. This was a facinating time in computing, at the dawn of newer, sprier operating systems, and the Internet. And, as is so often the case with language, the history of a word is the history of people, ideas, values, feelings, social philosophies, and on and on.

NOTE: Spoiler: The key fact is that "SPAM", in relation to Internet email, did NOT originally refer to commercial bulk email!

If this piques your interest, read on!

• Hormel invents the luncheon meat, "SPAM."
• Monty Python pens and executes the "SPAM sketch." An amazing achievement, it ingeniously links a fatty lunch meat to a social institution as old as time itself; "giving someone back as good as, or seriously better than, you got." This raised SPAM to mythic levels which it hardly deserved, which is cerainly part of the charm.
• Through DARPA funding, the first glimmerings of the Internet become available to academic and military computer researchers. Before ".com" was a gleam in anyone's eye, you had ".edu," and ".mil," which were public domains, funded predominantly by tax monies.
• The first Internet-connected computers ran almost entirely on academic versions of UNIX for their operating systems. These early academic productions were not very secure or robust. In fact, you could crash one of these systems by simply filling the "root spindle" (main hard disk) to 100%.
• When the first bulk commercial emails went out under this regime, the shock and indignity of seeing this kind of crass commercialism being engaged in on the government's nickel was profound. Over time, a collective response evolved; a notice went around to "SPAM the bastard," and hundreds (or thousands) of bulky return emails were dispatched post-haste to the sender of the despised commercial email. Under earlier, less robust versions of UNIX, the offending party's root spindle would fill to 100% and crash (and hopefully burn). Noting the perfect parallel to the Monty Python's "SPAM sketch," people started calling this return email "SPAM," like the male chorus drowning out the waitress in the Python sketch. Make sure to NOTICE that "SPAM" was originally this return email, NOT the original commercial bulk sending. As is usually the case, anthimeria quickly set in, producing the verb "to spam," meaning to deluge the shameless bastards with return email to crash their systems.
• The bulk emailers quickly got hip and figured out various ways to avoid this retribution. Technically savvy recipients came to realize that "spamming" their tormentors had become futile, and stopped the practice. However, the noun "spam" and the verb "to spam" had become so cozy and familiar that it was kept, although it had now mutated to refer to the original commercial email.

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