Brad Templeton On Spam's Silver Anniversary

Brad Templeton writes "This Saturday marks the 25th anniversary of the first spam I was able to find, and one month ago was the 10th anniversary of the first time a USENET posting was called a spam and the birth of the term (at least beyond mudds)." Templeton was also cited in the American Scientist article featured last Sunday.

Comments

"junk mail"

[raduga]

The earliest posting I can find on the whole of Google's cache has this curious subject:

the end is near .

I think there should not be any individual copies of human-nets or any of the "junk-mail" messages sent or stored on any machine at Berkeley. That there are multiple copies of this sent to individuals from Ernie to Cory and perhaps elsewhere is not permissible. I think that "getting flak from users" is not the way to guide system development. I suggest that individual names be removed from these lists immediately. If the ethernet changes things so that sending messages is free and fast, they can be put back on.

This is especially critical right now because all of the printers on CSVAX are down, and people are jamming the 1200 baud network link to cory with printouts. There is no excuse for duplicate traffic under such circumstances.

Re:Two explanations demanded

[btempleton]

I'm a unix geek like the rest of you.

The mudder's use is not recorded, of course, as far as I have found. Simply reports from mudders say that when people started flooding a mud with text, and later objects, somebody called it spamming. From the Monty Python, because the vikings keep repeating the word over and over and over again.

I have conflicting stories on the first use, but without logs we may never know.

Re:Oh, almost forgot

[panda]

> You still haven't answered my question. What does verbosity or a full screen have to do with salty canned meat?

Nothing, except that Monty Python's Flying Circus did a skit where a modern, normal-looking guy goes into a restaurant full of 10th C. Viking customers and a lady (played by a guy in drag) behind the counter. He asks for something to eat, I forget what. He's told that he can get "Spam, eggs and spam, or spam, spam, and spam." After some discussion that goes nowhere, the Vikings break out into a chant of "Spam! Spam! Spam! Spam-ity spam!" They repeat this chant over and over until it drowns out everything else going on in the scene.

The idea is that screen flooding becomes like the Vikings chanting "Spam." Nothing else goes on because nobody else can get a word in edgewise over the racket.