Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse
Much to the chagrin of Hormel Foods maker of the canned "Shoulder Pork and
hAM"/"SPiced hAM" luncheon meat, the term "spam" has today come to mean
network abuse, particularly junk E-mail and massive junk postings to USENET.
(See also my reflections on the 25th anniversary of spam
How did the term get this meaning? I went on a mission of etymological
research. In this article you'll learn how the term, born of canned ham,
moved into BBSs and MUDS and then was applied to USENET postings and E-mail.
I've put in a short history of the earliest big spams, including a special
page about the first E-mail spam from 1978. (You'll be astounded to see
which net celebrity defends the spam. But we were all younger then.)
(This is an interesting time for spammiversaries. March 31st, 2003 marks the
10th anniversary of the term Spam being applied to a USENET post, and May
3rd marks the 25th anniversary of the earliest documented E-mail spam.)
Plus at the bottom, a bit about the term surfing the net
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. How did the two get connected?
Canter and Siegel
In April of 1994, the term was not born, but it did jump a great deal in
popularity 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. This wasn't the first such abusive posting, nor the first
mass posting to be called a spam, but it was the first deliberate mass
posting to commonly get that name. They had posted their message a few times
before, but on April 12, they hired an mercenary programmer to write a
simple script to post their ad to every single newsgroup (message board) on
USENET, the world's largest online conferencing system. There were several
thousand such newsgroups, and each one got the ad.
Quickly people identified it as "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. It
turns out, however, that the term had been in use for some time before the
famous green card flood.
Later, some particularly nasty folks figured they could take mass e-mailing
software (which had been around for decades to handle mailing lists) and use
it to send junk e-mail to large audiences who hadn't asked for it. The term
quickly came to be used to describe these unwanted junk e-mails, and indeed
that is the most common use of the term today.
The MUDders
The "green card" spam didn't coin the term, and it wasn't even the first
"spam" -- though it was the first really large commercial one.
My research shows the term goes back to the late 1980s and the "MUD"
community.
A MUD is a multi-user-dungeon. That's a somewhat archaic term for a real
time multi-person shared environment, which is to say a shared world where
users can chat, move around and interact with locations and objects in the
environment. MUDs were named that because the first reminded people of
"adventure" or "Dungeons and Dragons" games that involved jointly exploring
a cave or dungeon. Modern successors of the MUD include EverQuest and The
Sims Online.
But most people used MUDs to chat, and to play around and impress one
another with objects they created. They were at first a highly evolved
successor for the chat room.
The term spamming got used to apply to a few different behaviours. One was
to flood the computer with too much data to crash it. Another was to "spam
the database" by having a program create a huge number of objects, rather
then creating them by hand. And the term was sometimes used to mean simply
flooding a chat session with a bunch of text inserted by a program (commonly
called a "bot" today) or just by inserting a file instead of your own real
time typing output.
There are unconfirmed reports as well that the term migrated to MUDs from
early "chat" systems. Rich Frueh believes the term originated on Bitnet's
the early chat system that IRC was named after. When the ability to input a
whole file to the chat system was implemented, people would annoy others by
dumping the words to the Monty Python Spam Song. Peter da Silva reports use
in early 80s chat on TRS-80 based BBSs, but feels since they imported other
Bitnet Relay customs, the term may have come from there. Another unconfirmed
report from a BBS user claims to have seen it defined as a "Single Post to
All Messagebases" though this origin seems unlikely in my personal opinion.
Another report describes indirectly a person simply typing "spam, spam..."
in a MUD with a keyboard macro until being thrown off around 1985.
My research has not found BBSers or Relay chatters using the term in USENET
messages, so for now I conclude it was MUDders who brought the term to
USENET and email.
Here we see a thread where MUDders discuss the meaning and origin of the
word Spam in 1990.
_____
First Spams
After the MUDders used the term, from time to time it would be used to
describe a net abuse, but its use was fairly rare. People far more commonly
talked of the luncheon meat. It wasn't a bad term at the time, and many
people liked to use it in site names, userids, signatures etc.
1978: The first internet E-mail spam, sent by DEC
Einar Stefferud, a longtime net hand, reports that DEC announced a new
DEC-20 machine in 1978 by sending an invite to all ARPANET addresses on the
west coast, using the ARPANET directory, inviting people to receptions in
California. They were chastised for breaking the ARPANET appropriate use
policy, and a notice was sent out reminding others of the rule.
I have put up a page with the message and its reaction or you can see it
directly in the msggroup archives (if they come back online.) It may amuse
some to see a young Richard Stallman as one of the defenders of the spam
Compaq now owns DEC, so perhaps Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard's heirs are
simply among those who vowed never to do business with spammers? Of course
in 1978 nobody called this a spam.
Even earlier, non-network spam
Tom Van Vleck, co-author of the CTSS MAIL command, reports an even earlier
spam sent on MIT's Compatbile Time Sharing System (CTSS) as far back as
1971. A sysadmin named Peter Bos used CTSS MAIL to send everybody the
anti-war message that: "THERE IS NO WAY TO PEACE. PEACE IS THE WAY." He
reports the spammer defended it by saying, "but this is important." He was
also an authorized admin, so this one is somewhat harder to classify. A
great history of early mail systems < provides more details.
And people were thinking about the problem even before it took place. In
1975, RFC706 by Jon Postel mused on the issue.
jj@cup.portal.com says: HELP ME!
Rob Noha, using the account JJ@cup.portal.com posted on May 24, 1988 to as
many newsgroups as he could find a plea to HELP ME! and send money to his
college fund, as he was, he claimed, running out.
Thus the first USENET spam was, in a sense, a charity spam. Or perhaps
charity 'scam' is a better word.
JJ posted to many groups, but each post was crossposted to 4 or 5
newsgroups, to reduce the total volume, but still annoy.
However, nobody ever used the term "spam" to refer to this posting until
1996. It did spark a lot of debate about the merits of having sites like
Portal, which sold accounts to anybody with a few dollars. This somewhat
elitist viewpoint got even more prevalent when AOL was poised to join the
fray.
Make Money Fast
For many years, the classic unwanted post on USENET was the "Dave Rhodes"
"MAKE MONEY FAST" post. This was a pretty standard chain letter, but a lot
of people started sending it to mailing lists and posting it to newsgroups
for no good reason. Most were roundly chastised. Some ran away and were
never heard from again. Others learned to play well with others.
However, while there were many "MAKE MONEY FAST" postings in the early 90s
and even the 80s, they were usually one-off postings, each one by a
different person. Thus they weren't called spam (until after ARMM, below.)
ARMM -- first to be called spam.
In 1993, Richard Depew tried to make some changes in USENET. He advanced a
somewhat controversial idea called retro-moderation, where newsgroups would
be semi-moderated (that is to say, regulated so that not all postings would
appear) through a moderator who canceled postings that broke the rules.
Moderated groups were common, but with those, each posting was pre-screened
by the moderator. He suggested allowing a moderator to screen after the
fact. Because this was new, and reminded people of censorship (since
canceling the postings of others was normally a major faux pas), this was
quite controversial. Depew got his own fan group, and both allies and
detractors.
However, what really got people upset was March 31, 1993. He had been
playing with some software to perform the retro-moderation task. His
software, called ARMM, had a bug, and he ran it, and it ended up posting 200
messages in a row to news.admin.policy, the newsgroup where people discussed
the running of the net. You can see an example here.
It really ticked people off, and some people, knowing the term from MUDs,
called it a spam. The very day ARMM was run, Joel Furr, as far as I can
tell, was the first to call a spam a spam.
Depew himself shortly apologized for having done a spam <using the term
himself. However, many would say that this wasn't a true spam, since it was
an accident.
First Giant Spam
The first major USENET spam came on January 18 of 1994. Every single
newsgroup found in it a religious screed declaring: Global Alert for All:
Jesus is Coming Soon <
This one caused a ton of debate and controversy. The Andrews University
sysadmin (Clarence Thomas, no relation) who sent it generated a flurry of
complaints against his institution and some press, though reportedly he
never got more than a mild punishment at the time. He did however eventually
leave the University, but was also known to have done some more minor
religious spams at later dates.
Normally in USENET you can post a message to more than one newsgroup using
the "crossposting" mechanism. The advantage with this is that the message
only goes out once, and people who read both newsgroups only see it once.
This feature is highly useful if not abused, yet most major conferencing
systems never implemented it.
However, it was not practical to crosspost to every single newsgroup, nor
desired. Still, this event provided a button at the USENIX Unix conference
saying "Jesus is coming and he doesn't know how to crosspost."
One of the most annoying things about this message was that not only did you
see it again, and again, for every newsgroup you read, but it also showed up
as the only message of the day in newsgroups that had low traffic levels.
Most people like their low traffic newsgrous with low traffic, and this
posting and others like it would soon spoil that serenity.
Green Card
Around four months after the Jesus spam, in April of 1994, Canter and Siegel
posted the famous Green Card Lottery - Final One? spam. It also was posted
to every group.
Unlike prior net abusers, Canter and Siegel didn't turn tail and run. They
were proud of it, even though net residents attacked in return, flooding
their phone lines, fax machine and mail boxes. Every account they had
associated with this activity was pulled. Their ISP was overloaded by the
heat of the reaction, actually hurting a lot of people.
They were unrecalcitrant, and this is what really made people angry. This
spam made the newspapers; it made them famous. They announced plans to form
a consulting company to post such ads for other people. They wrote and got
published a book about their exploits with the long title of: How to Make a
Fortune on the Information Superhighway : Everyone's Guerrilla Guide to
Marketing on the Internet and Other On-Line Services.
The book was dreadful, and didn't sell well, and in a remarkable show of
restraint, people on the net ignored calls to stage protests at their book
signings, and instead ignored them. It worked, and they vanished into
deserved obscurity.
Onward
I wrote this to be a history of the term spam, though that required a bit of
the history of the act itself. Keith Lynch has a Spam Timeline > which
details some of the later history of spam. In fact, back in 1989 I wrote
what I think was the first timeline history of USENET which can now be
filled out with the use of google.
Spam did a lot to ruin USENET, unfortunately. Newsgroup spam was brought
into check, oddly enough, by people applying Depew's ARMM principles with
better software engineering skills. Today the only reason USENET manages at
all is an army of anti-spam software that send out cancels and NoCem
messages, with filters that block it on the way into servers.
But E-mail spam caused even more harm, in a way. Records show people quickly
started talking about email spams not long after the term became popular for
USENET spam. As E-mail spam grew, it became apparent that many mailings were
being generated to anybody who had posted to a USENET newsgroup. Programs
were "harvesting" the addresses from messages to make mailing lists and send
junk mail to them.
This in turn made people afraid to participate in the net. Post to the net
(or go into a chat room) with your real E-mail address, and you would soon
find your mailbox flooded with spam. Not very appealing. A number of people
left the net or stopped posting altogether. Others took to no longer putting
their real e-mail address in their postings, either putting in a useless
address, or putting in an address that a live human could figure how to
change into the real one.
One great damage of that was it broke the E-mail reply function in USENET.
One thing that had made USENET quite different in the early days from other
online conferences like BBSs and Compuserve was that not only could you
reply to a posting with E-mail, you were often expected to. The recipient
was expected to summarize replies if they were interesting. That way it kept
down (but certainly didn't eliminate) private messages and me-too posts
presented to everybody. You were supposed to take your flame wars to E-mail;
now it's very difficult to do so.
I did this research because I've been doing a lot of thinking about the spam
problem and solutions to it, particularly in E-mail. I have a page of essays
on spam if you are curious.
When Google expanded their USENET archive to go back 20 years, it became
possible for the first time to really research these questions again.
By the way, Hormel eventually gave up complaining about the new definition
for their trademark and decided to embrace the fact it boosted sales of
their merchandise.
More remembrances of USENET
At about the same time as I was researching this, I wrote an article for the
O'Reilly Network called I Remember USENET < with some stories of the early
days of the net. You may enjoy it.
Other Etymology (Net-Surfing)
The new USENET archive at google is a gold-mine for etymology. For example,
a bit of research seems to show that the term "net-surfing" originated with
Brendan Kehoe, also known as the author of "Zen and the art of the
Internet," an early internet book.
In this thread from 1991 he uses the term to refer to somebody browsing
telnet sites (there was no web at the time). Two messages later, Ron Newman
talks about how he likes the term and wants to spread it!
However, others claim independent coinage, including possibly Mark McCahil
the Gopher developer (they used the metaphor a lot) and others back to the
80s who talked about Information Surfing. Paul Saffo used the term
"information surfing" in a 1988 magazine column and reports it was commonly
used and "definitely already in the zeitgeist" before he wrote it. Even
Marshall McLuhan used the metaphor of surfing data like ur-surfer Duke
Kahanomoku.
In addition, the term "channel surfing" shows first use in January 91, and
seems to have originated at the same time. Several of the early users of
forms of the term claim they did so due to a love of real water surfing, so
this appears to be a metaphor of many parents.
source: www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html