The Story of Spam

How did Spam become the word for unwanted email?

Hormel Foods Corp. first rolled out Spam in 1937, though the origins of the brand name are a bit obscure. According to the corporate history on the official Spam website, Ken Daigneau, the brother of a Hormel Foods vice president, won a contest with a prize of $100 for coming up with the name.

Hormel is cagey about the name’s meaning, though. “One popular belief says it’s derived from the words ‘spiced ham,’” their website says. “The real answer is known by only a small circle of former Hormel Foods executives. And probably Nostradamus.” The “spiced ham” theory is supported by a 1937 publication from the U.S. Patent Office reporting the trademark: “For Canned Meats—Namely, Spiced Ham.” But the main ingredient of Spam has historically been pork shoulder, with ham added in.

Spam was originally marketed as a “miracle meat” perfect for any occasion. But it developed a checkered reputation from its use as a stand-in when no fresh meat was available, especially in food shortages during and after World War II. Famously, Monty Python’s Flying Circus turned the postwar ubiquity of Spam into a surreal punchline in a 1970 television sketch. A waitress at a greasy spoon reciting such delicacies as “Spam, egg, Spam, Spam, bacon and Spam” incongruously leads to a chorus of Vikings loudly singing about “wonderful Spam.”

Monty Python’s Spam sketch was a favorite of tech nerds of the 1980s, who playfully applied the term to the world of computing. As early as 1984, “spam” showed up alongside the nonsensical monosyllables “foo” and “bar” as a placeholder term for variables in discussions of computer programming. (“Spam” would become a standard variable name in the programming language Python, which owes its name to Monty Python fandom.)

On bulletin-board systems of the ’80s, repeating the text “spam” over and over again could be used as a way to flood a message board to keep other users from posting. By 1990, “spam” became a verb referring to this type of flooding, especially when done to overflow the buffer of a program running a system in order to crash it. It became particularly popular among those playing a type of online game known as a Multi-User Dungeon, or MUD, and early examples come from MUD discussion groups. As one participant put it, “it has been generalized to mean sending lots of crap to servers as well as people you want to annoy the hell out of.”

“Spamming” soon became a headache in the Usenet newsgroups of the early ’90s, with multiple posts flooding the zone for mere mischief or for commercial purposes. The commercial type of spam then reared its head on email servers, requiring the creation of “spam filters” and other anti-spam measures.

Posted by on January 27th, 2019 at 12:39 am


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