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the term "spam" has today come to mean network abuse, particularly junk E-mail and massive junk postings to USENET.
Most people have some vague awareness that it came from at first from the spam skit by Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the sketch, a restaurant serves all its food with lots of spam, and the waitress repeats the word several times in describing how much spam is in the items. When she does this, a group of Vikings (don't ask) in the corner start a song:
"Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam!"
Until told to shut up.
Thus the meaning of the term at least: something that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance.
The term got really popular in April of 1994, when two lawyers from Phoenix named Canter and Siegel posted a message advertising their fairly useless services in an upcoming U.S. "green card" lottery.
Quickly people called it a "spam" and the word caught on. Future multiple postings soon got the appelation. Some people also applied it to individual unwanted ads that weren't posted again and again, though generally it was associated with the massive flood of the same message.
LET ME BE THE FIRST TO SAY - SHUT UP
~Brett
@dormangels.com
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