Last week, Farcaster was dominated by discussions about spam. Dan wrote a post The spam filtering dilemma. I took this opportunity to dive into history of spam. It's always interesting to me to explore the origins of words, and this four-letter word indeed has a fascinating story.

In 1994, when the internet was gaining mass adoption, the word "spam" began to be used for any irrelevant and unsolicited message sent en masse.

USENET

Established in 1980 - USENET, a global distributed discussion system, allowed users to read and post messages (called articles or posts, collectively termed "news") in one or more topic categories, known as news-groups.

In 1993, Richard Depew tried to make changes in USENET by advancing semi-moderated newsgroups through moderators who could cancel posts that broke the rules. Moderated groups were common, but in those, each post was pre-screened by a moderator. Depew's approach was controversial because censorship and freedom of speech were core internet values, and they remain hotly debated topics, particularly after being reignited on a mass level by Elon Musk.

On March 31, 1993, Depew was experimenting with software designed for retroactive moderation. His program, called ARMM, had a bug, and after running it, it posted 200 messages in a row to news.admin.policy, the newsgroup where discussions about the net's management took place. Joel Furr was the first one to call it Spam in this discussion on the fiasco.

Green Card Lottery

A few days later, Canter and Siegel posted their infamous "Green Card Lottery - Final One?" message to all 6,000 newsgroups. They continued posting for some time and reportedly made millions of dollars from their efforts, becoming two of the most hated figures on the internet. They even wrote a book titled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway: Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services.

Few more incidents like this gained mass media attention, popularizing the term "spam". The meaning of spam evolved to refer to the mass-sending of messages or emails. However, Joel Furr wasn’t actually the first person to use the term.

The MUDers

The MUD (Multi-User-Dungeon) community had already been using the term "spam" for years. MUD is an online environment where multiple users are logged on and interacting with one and other. On some MUDs you only interact with other players that are logged on, similar to an online chat system. On other MUDs you can also interact with a game world where you can explore, fight monsters, and collect treasure, either alone or in the company of other players that are logged on. On some MUDs, the environment itself can be changed and expanded by the players themselve. On others, you must play the game long enough to advance to a Wizard level at which time you can add new areas to the game. Allowing players to change and add to the MUD world itself is one of the unique features that make MUDs so unique and fun. Every MUD you visit will be different in subtle or dramatic ways.

In MUD communities, "spamming" referred to a few behaviors: flooding a computer with so much data that it crashed, "spamming the database" by creating a huge number of objects through programs, or flooding chat sessions with repetitive text using a bot (the term wasn't used at that time). Essentially, it meant net abuse.

Monty Python

One of the MUD world was inspired by Monty Python, where they would repeatedly type "SPAM" just to annoy others. This came from a skit in Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which a restaurant serves every dish with lots of spam, and the waitress repeats the word "spam" several times. In response, a group of Vikings in the corner starts singing:

"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"

Until they’re told to shut up.

Watch here-

So SPAM in Monty Python was used for a food item.

Tinned Food

Since 1937, spam has been used to mean "canned meat," after one particular brand of it, SPAM, which was named for a combination of the words spiced and ham.

Conclusion

It’s funny to think that a word once associated with spiced ham would eventually become one of the biggest headaches of the digital world. What started as a Monty Python joke, with Vikings singing "spam, spam, spam," turned into a term that the internet borrowed to describe the relentless flood of unwanted messages.

From MUD players getting creative with it, to USENET users enduring real-world "spam attacks," the word has evolved right alongside the internet itself. And now, even in web3 communities, the battle against spam continues. It's a reminder of how language, technology, and culture are always intertwined, with even the simplest of words taking on unexpected roles in our digital lives.

In the end, spam might have begun as canned meat, but today, it represents an ongoing challenge and a quirky part of the internet’s ever-growing story.