[Ads-l] Antedatings and Etymological Speculation Concerning "Spam" (Computing)

Sat Oct 5 02:32:05 UTC 2019

I wrote about "spam" in my Wall Street Journal column in January (apologies
for the paywall):

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-story-of-spam-how-a-mystery-meat-became-an-inbox-invader-11548353799

Doing research for the column, I found various early evidence in Usenet
newsgroups, and the Monty Python connection was often mentioned in these
posts. See, for example, this post from 1990, when "spamming" primarily
referred to overflowing the buffer of a program running a system in order
to crash it. (This sense, which was a precursor to email spamming, is
discussed in the Jargon File but is not fully treated in the OED entry.)

-----
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.games.mud/fUxvPNpEZEA/cEOnc-2fSqIJ
rec.games.mud, Sept. 26, 1990
[Mat Watson:]
Seems I'm not hip to the lingo.  Spamming?  I see a lot of reference to the
word, but I'm not really sure what it means.  It seems to be associtated
with
1.  Entering lots of commands.
2.  Causing problems with the server. (maybe crash?)
Please explain the meaning to me.
[Andrew C. Plotkin:]
Same etymology as "trashing." Implied definition is "Putting so much load
on the system that it crumbles into a pile of trash / Spam / other useless
substance."
For a more vivid image, imagine taking some small cute animal and pounding
it with many many bricks. The result resembles Spam. (Yes, I know, it's
gross. We're immature hacker geeks and we *think* that way. :-)
[Patrick J. Wetmore:]
HERETIC! Ooh, you fool! Weenie! That's most definitely not where spamming
came from. Spam refers to a Monty Python skit, where vikings sing "Spam" at
a lady who floats down from the ceiling in a restaurant where they serve
spam with everything. The verb "to spam" would be to send lots and lots of
useless information (in particular, the word "spam") over and over to
someone, thus scrolling their screen with lots and lots of lines of "spam
spam spam spam spam spam" etc. It has been generalized to mean sending lots
of crap to servers as well as people you want to annoy the hell out of.
A man who doesn't know his Monty Python is not a man worth talking to.
- Hurin, "could I have some spam spam eggs spam bacon spam spam and sausage
and spam and spam?" (or whatnot)
[Ben Gamble:]
I have a friend who used to be active on the BBS scene (Hi Rich, if you're
reading!) who told me tales of social interaction in chat mode. Often, when
an annoying, usually newbie-type person (a "munchie") arrived on the scene,
they would (each!) invoke the 'spam' program, whose function was to pipe a
given file to the munchie's connection in the BBS equivalent of a whisper
bomb.  I'm told the most popular file arguments to 'spam(1)' ( (-: ) were
lpr pictures of Ferraris and so forth.
So it seems likely that the name came from Python, but that this story is
part of the etymology of spam's use in the client/server context.
-----

Here are some additional early cites I collected from Usenet, showing the
evolution of the term.
-----
* "spam" n. (metasyntactic variable like "foo" or "bar," later common in
Python -- a programming language named in honor of Monty Python)
net.unix-wizards, Aug. 8, 1984
In the "Usenet maps," each host has an entry something like the following
(omitting parts not relevant to this topic):
Name:        FOO
News:        BAR        BLETCH
Mail:        SPAM
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/net.unix-wizards/PzvcS4Lb8yY/8FbPMHGBYWYJ
-----
* "spam page" (VMS -- for buffer overflow?)
comp.os.vms, Feb. 9, 1990
There's a SPAM page every so often (one per 1089 pages, default). There's
an Area Inventory page per SPAM page.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.os.vms/CgtPEsFJJL0/ft_GNS9XSqUJ
-----
* "spam" v. (Jargon File sense 1: "crash a program by overrunning a
fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data")
alt.mud, June 20, 1990
I was phoned once long distance about some individual doing their best to
spam the database (and doing a good job of it, I might add).
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.mud/-_UHB8oIdes/VFkIKsY-H7EJ
-----
* "spamming" vbl. n. (Jargon File sense 1)
alt.mud, June 27, 1990
For example, a delay of 5 to 10 seconds between object creations and
logging in, will all do the trick of 'limiting' spamming without the
juggling of quotas, login times, keeping track of hosts, et al.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.mud/SK3uc9ga5yc/maTmTT72nhgJ
-----
* "spammer" (one who attacks a database by spamming)
rec.games.mud, Apr. 20, 1991
Perhaps r.g.m is filled with flame wars because the MUDs are filled with
jerks and sluts and spammers and lechers, all going under the pretense that
if they're bothering you then you can always stop playing the game?
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.games.mud/GQTVmS0o_xM/t3BC5xSMVuwJ
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rec.games.mud, May 1, 1991
Even though a spammer couldn't easily as do as much damage through a
regular character, I'd still like to think the player's own stuff was
secure.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.games.mud/HSSDHCgA_4o/EOfIn4_7cGoJ
-----

On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 10:20 PM Alan Knutson <boris1951 at charter.net> wrote:

> https://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html
>
> This article has some instances of 'spam' on USENET that
> date from 1993
>
> On 10/4/2019 9:05 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
> >> On Oct 4, 2019, at 9:32 PM, Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> wrote:
> >>
> >> Here are some minor antedatings of the OED's first uses of "spam"
> (computing) and "spammer":
> >>
> >> spam, v. (OED 1994 [25 July])  1994 _Manhattan_ (Kan.) _Mercury_ 8 May
> 52/4 (Newspapers.com)  The cost to spam an advertisement in thousands of
> news groups, where it is potentially read by hundreds of thousands of
> computer users, is typically less than $50.
> >>
> >> spammer (OED 1994 [25 July])  1994 _San Francisco Examiner_ 25 May 32/1
> (Newspapers.com)  Some Netheads responded to the lawyers' ad barrage with
> guerilla tactics, "flaming" the spammers.
> >>
> >> The etymology of this use of the word "spam" is almost universally said
> to derive from a Monty Python skit in which the food-name "Spam" is
> repeated incessantly.  Am I the only one who questions this derivation?  To
> me the semantic link between mass promulgation of advertisements and
> massive repetition of a word. although plausible, is somewhat weak.  The
> South Bend Tribune, 12 May 1994, said that "Among network veterans, such
> random posting is called 'spamming' -- a term derived from a brand of pink,
> canned meat that splatters messily when hurled."  The OED's first citation
> for the verb "spam," dated 25 July 1994, says the term was "meant to evoke
> the effect of dropping a can of Spam into a fan filling the surrounding
> space with meat" (this brings to mind the idiom "the shit hits the fan").
> In neither of these two articles is there any mention of Monty Python.  I
> suggest that "Spam splattering messily when hurled" may be a more likely
> etymological explanation of the computing meaning of "spam" than the Python
> skit.
> >>
> >> Fred Shapiro
> >>
> > Plausible enough. If that’s right, Monty Python would have been played
> the role in the Spam Chronicles that Martin (“Old Kinderhook”) Van Buren
> and the “O.K. club” played in the trajectory of “O.K.” after the latter was
> initiated by the newspapers as detailed in A. W. Read’s chronology.
> >
> > LH
> >

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