History of SPAM

• The earliest documented junk e-mailing was sent in 1978 by DEC- Digital Equipment Corporation
• The word SPAM came from a "spam skit" by Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the skit, a restaurant serves a lot food with spam in it and the server repeats the word several times in describing how much spam is in the food on the menu. In the skit a group of Vikings in the corner of the restaurant start to sing a song, "spam ,spam , spam, spam, spam, lovely spam! Wonderful spam! They sang the song until they were told to shut up. So the meaning of SPAM became known as "something that keeps repeating and repeating to great annoyance."
• The first large commercial SPAM was sent in April 1994 by two lawyers. They posted a message advertising a "green card" lottery. They hired a programmer to write a script to post their ad to every single newsgroup on USENET (the world's largest online conferencing system). Quickly people identified this as SPAM and the word caught on.