What Does Spam Stand For (Alternative View)

An alternative history and definition of the word "spam". This explanation for the origins of the term spam was emailed to me by a guy called Jim who stumbled across my site one day and gave me a little piece of e-history :-) Thanks Jim!

Back in the BBS (Bulletin Board System) days with the NEW high-speed V32 2400-baud modems it would take a very long time to download a program or picture from your BBS. This was much like Kazaa or Napster is today. You upload some thing and others can download it. One such uploader advertised his posts as pictures of nude women. After a half hour download and putting all the pieces together the picture turned out to be a picture of a can of SPAM. Where are my nude ladies and an hour of my time? People replied to the messages and wrote SPAM. This way we knew not to D/L that picture. After USENET got going the term stuck meaning something false - do not download (or believe) this. The jump to UBE (Unsolicited Bulk Email) or UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) being called SPAM was a natural evolution of the term.

When TV news shows (60 minutes 20/20 etc.) do specials on the problem of SPAM it looks a lot better to show the SPAM skit than to have some balding, fat, middle age, geek talking about 600 and 2400 baud modems and downloading porn that turned out to be just SPAM.

I almost prefer this new explanation don't you?

See also the original description of What does Spam Stand For?