Spam continues to blight email exactly 15 years after the term was first coined and almost 30 years since the first spam message was sent. The term is thought to have been coined by Joel Furr, an administrator on the net discussion system Usenet, to refer to unsolicited bulk messages. Mr Furr first used the term to refer to bulk postings on discussion boards on the internet but in the years to come spam became associated with email. Today, more than 90% of all email is spam, according to anti-spam body Spamhaus.
Read full story: BBC
Comments
I never cease to be amazed at the numerous indigenous cultures around the world who can pass on stories orally (often not having a system of writing) for centuries with almost no change. Now we've got this digital internet thing and we can't keep stories even slightly straight for one generation. I remember the term spam being used in its current meaning on Usenet sometime back in the 1980's. There was already an apparently never resolved debate on Usenet on who coined the term (with me being a minor contender) prior to the currently reported supposed first existence 15 years ago, and even then no-one could say for sure as it had already been collectively forgotten. Perhaps some newsadmin has backup tapes to tell the true story, and perhaps not, tapes degrade with time.
I went to google groups for some help on this, but despite supposedly going back to 1981, the results seem to only go back to 2006 (why did google buy deja-view?).
Wikipedia, in its spam history repeats the often told, and wildly incorrect, story that lawyers Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel more or less started large scale spam on Usenet in 1994.
Meanwhile the referenced BBC article has numerous errors, one of which is that the original Monty Python spam sketch regards a restaurant only serving spam (the Hormel meat product). That's not hard to check out, not only is internet memory flakey, apparently so is television (Monty Python was on the BBC for pity's sake, but then tapes do degrade). I won't even get into their misunderstanding of spam botnets, that's a more technical subject and my current comments are intended to be sociological.
Humanity is amazingly adept at crafting double edged swords. We start out with this internet tool and wind up building a tower of babble, and not all of it is spam. -g
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The original use in a computing context was in 1985 when someone harassed a Pern MUSH by echoing "SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM..." repeatedly while the users were participating in a significant (for them) online event. He was kicked off by the administrators, but afterwards was known as "that guy who spammed us". The term stuck, and the rest was history.
See http://www.rahul.net/falk/glossary.html#spam for a slightly more detailed history of the word 'spam'.