Spam Wars: The Battle History

MUD: Users Name the Beast 'Spam'

The only constant in the Great Spam War is change.

Perhaps now we (tinw) will see street corner dealers selling/hawking/pushing monthly Bullet Proof Hosting to those hooked on spamming, a known and destructive addictive behaviour.

-- Sun Tsu - The Art of War

Once upon a time back in the '70's some people were using the internet to play a game involving a lot of typewritten communications. Some disgruntled individual kept interrupting the game by typing "spam spam spam spam!" into the system, mimicking the famous Monty Python comedy sketch of a few years before. The people thereafter referred to him as "that guy who spammed us," and lacking a better term for this kind of disruptive behavior the word stuck.

Source: http://www.seige-perilous.org/spam/spam-basics.html