What happened to spam?

[swill453]

Being brought up in Scotland in the 60s and 70s, Spam was one of the many things that was sliced, battered, fried and served up.

Scott.

[sg31]

Is spam the same as what used to be called pork luncheon meat? If not, I'm not sure I ever encountered the kind that you'd have in a tin.

I was only born in the 1960s,

It was much softer than pork luncheon meet, it was the same but different in a disgustingly pink way. My wife bought a tin to torment me with a few years ago. I'd forgotten how salty it was. It brought back memories but not in a good way.

I was born in the mid 50's. I can remember having spam fritters as part of school dinners. You don't know how lucky you are to have missed spam it.

[AleisterCrowley]

It's classic WW2 food. Better than nowt during rationing. Only just though

[vrdiver]

(hating spam since before email was invented)

I was only born in the 1960s, so I don't recollect a time before email was invented.

Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#:~: ... as%20email.

I was born in 1964 and have early memories of spam, none of them good. If I smell the stuff these days, it takes me straight back to a kitchen table I couldn't leave until I'd finished a plate of food I wouldn't eat.

VRD

[UncleEbenezer]

(hating spam since before email was invented)

I was only born in the 1960s, so I don't recollect a time before email was invented.

Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#:~: ... as%20email.

I was born in 1964 and have early memories of spam, none of them good. If I smell the stuff these days, it takes me straight back to a kitchen table I couldn't leave until I'd finished a plate of food I wouldn't eat.

VRD

That's an argument about what counts as email: there were very early but recognisable predecessors going back to the 1960s.

And as late as the 1990s, email was still heterogenous: there were different forms of address and routing (and gateways between them), not just the user@domain format we know today.

[ursaminortaur]

(hating spam since before email was invented)

I was only born in the 1960s, so I don't recollect a time before email was invented.

Ray Tomlinson is credited as the inventor of email; in 1971, he developed the first system able to send mail between users on different hosts across the ARPANET, using the @ sign to link the user name with a destination server. By the mid-1970s, this was the form recognized as email.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email#:~: ... as%20email.

I was born in 1964 and have early memories of spam, none of them good. If I smell the stuff these days, it takes me straight back to a kitchen table I couldn't leave until I'd finished a plate of food I wouldn't eat.

VRD

The use of the term Spam in something like its modern usage seems to have originated on MUDs and then spread to Usenet newsgroups before then spreading to Email though there are unconfirmed reports of it being used even earlier on chat systems.

https://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html

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, World of Warcraft 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 so much data as 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 Relay, the early chat system that IRC (Internet Relay Chat) 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 highly unlikely in my judgement.

Another report describes indirectly a person simply typing "spam, spam..." in a MUD with a keyboard macro until being thrown off around 1985.

(Another report by a blogger that she believes she observed the birth of the term spam in AOL Star Trek chat rooms turns out to date from 94-95 and thus postdates the word entering common usage via other channels.)

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.

[Rhyd6]

Those of you declaring that spam as a food is awful have obviously not encountered brawn - another name for which is head cheese.

R6

[scotia]

Glasgow chip pan fires.

As a child we had a summer holiday in Rothesay (over 70 years ago), and almost every day, in the early evening, we heard the Fire Brigade - out to another chip pan fire. I was great fun following it to watch the action. One evening, it was a bigger blaze - at the fish and chip shop.

[Mike4]

Glasgow chip pan fires.

As a child we had a summer holiday in Rothesay (over 70 years ago), and almost every day, in the early evening, we heard the Fire Brigade - out to another chip pan fire. I was great fun following it to watch the action. One evening, it was a bigger blaze - at the fish and chip shop.

I'd forgotten about chip pan fires! ISTR seeing adverts on telly as a child by the Fire Brigade, warning of the dangers of chip pan fires and what to do if you had one. Specifically, don't throw water on it was the message that penetrated my impressionable young brain at the time...

[AleisterCrowley]

Those of you declaring that spam as a food is awful have obviously not encountered brawn - another name for which is head cheese.

R6

I had heard of brawn but wasn't quite sure what it was - sadly I looked it up on Wikipedia, and I now can't face my lunch

[bungeejumper]

almost every day, in the early evening, we heard the Fire Brigade - out to another chip pan fire. I was great fun following it to watch the action. One evening, it was a bigger blaze - at the fish and chip shop.

I used to use a builder who was finally forced to give up the profession after his fondness for pork pies got the better of him. Twice in four months, he went through a customer's roof and had to be rescued.

Recognising the inevitability of the situation, he set up a fish and chip shop, which he called the Fat Friar. It had only been in business two weeks when the whole place burned to the ground. Are there any professions where it's guaranteed impossible to fail?

BJ

[kempiejon]

Those of you declaring that spam as a food is awful have obviously not encountered brawn - another name for which is head cheese.

R6

I have a mate who was part of a family syndicate that used to buy piglets from a local farmer, the farm houses and husbands the pig but the owners get to check out the animals progress, they contribute to the costs and look at them - then they have a day with a butcher processing the carcass into chops, joints and sausages - 2 years on the trot(ter) no one wanted the head and my chum knowing me bought one round. Pigs cheeks are nice, a bit beefy in flavour for a pig, we tried crispy pigs ears - definitely not worth it. Boiled pig tongue not to bad actually, but I'm happy to eat cow tongue sandwiches which many turn their nose up at. Brawn was good though. It's just a pate/terrine. It's only pork and probably a bit less dubious than sausages.

[XFool]

You're lucky. I get at least 6 per day and for some reason, most of them are in German.

Six a day?

It's twenty years now since I last (experimentally) turned off spam filtering for a week. Though known spam-factory domains were still firewalled off.

Got 4000-4500 a day during that week.

Ye Gods! How? Why? I don't understand...

[XFool]

I normally get dozens of spam emails a day. For almost four days now I have had none. What's happened?

I've no idea. I don't get "Spam"...

Can you describe or categorise what you mean by Spam? Just a quick summary of what those "dozens of spam email a day" entail, if that's possible.

TIA

[kempiejon]

You're lucky. I get at least 6 per day and for some reason, most of them are in German.

Six a day?

It's twenty years now since I last (experimentally) turned off spam filtering for a week. Though known spam-factory domains were still firewalled off.

Got 4000-4500 a day during that week.

Ye Gods! How? Why? I don't understand...

My google spam folder only has 30 day's worth and it's at 438 messages. perhaps a handful I manually delete or reclassify each week.

[XFool]

That's an argument about what counts as email: there were very early but recognisable predecessors going back to the 1960s.

And as late as the 1990s, email was still heterogenous: there were different forms of address and routing (and gateways between them), not just the user@domain format we know today.

Ah!... I remember it well. And UK email addresses were 'backwards' relative to US addresses. And even the US still had a heterogeneous computer network. What fun it was trying to get people's emails sent from here to over 'there', trying to steer them to their intended destination by working out which US gateway stood a chance in hell of routing them on correctly. Along with how to suitably wrap up the reverse UK email address in the hope of getting a reply.

[Mike4]

I normally get dozens of spam emails a day. For almost four days now I have had none. What's happened?

I've no idea. I don't get "Spam"...

Can you describe or categorise what you mean by Spam? Just a quick summary of what those "dozens of spam email a day" entail, if that's possible.

TIA

Really? Your ISP must have some pretty good spam filters installed then.

Here is one (of hundreds) copied and pasted from my spam box:

(The text is littered with links which I think have been filtered out by the TLF software.)


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[XFool]

I've no idea. I don't get "Spam"...

Can you describe or categorise what you mean by Spam? Just a quick summary of what those "dozens of spam email a day" entail, if that's possible.

TIA

Really? Your ISP must have some pretty good spam filters installed then.

I don't really know, but I don't think that is the answer.

Here is one (of hundreds) copied and pasted from my spam box:

(The text is littered with links which I think have been filtered out by the TLF software.)

Thanks for the samples. Yes, that's what I understand as Spam.
One thing, do you run any kind of business, or have a public webpage with your email address on, or share it with anyone else? Obviously, people who do ARE inevitably going to get Spam. OTOH, as with myself, I have no public webpage or display of my email address. It's just an ordinary private, single individual, email account.

This subject keeps coming up, all the way back to TMF, and I find it increasingly puzzling. Obviously people who complain of Spam are receiving Spam, people not receiving Spam are not complaining of receiving Spam - or complaining about not receiving it, presumably. So it isn't easy to get a balanced view of what is going on. Again, I speak as a private individual with no email address on public display. There will be two different categories of users/email accounts: Private and Public. Expectations should be different between them!

My expectation is (based on many years experience): Zero Spam emails per year - every year.

I notice all your samples are finance related, could this not be a clue to the original source?

[Charlottesquare]

Glasgow chip pan fires.

As a child we had a summer holiday in Rothesay (over 70 years ago), and almost every day, in the early evening, we heard the Fire Brigade - out to another chip pan fire. I was great fun following it to watch the action. One evening, it was a bigger blaze - at the fish and chip shop.

I'd forgotten about chip pan fires! ISTR seeing adverts on telly as a child by the Fire Brigade, warning of the dangers of chip pan fires and what to do if you had one. Specifically, don't throw water on it was the message that penetrated my impressionable young brain at the time...

A damp but wrung out tea towel to starve it of oxygen I think was the prescribed control though we had various fire extinguishers in our house including a powder one.

I suspect every Scottish home had a chip pan, ours had a very heavy base and the fat went solid when cold, every so often the fat was warmed and then filtered to remove some of the worst of the debris, it was similar to the never ending porridge pot, it seemed to last forever.

Then again diet was pretty regular. Roast on Sunday, stew from it Monday, soup & dumplings Tuesday, mince & tatties and macaroni cheese covered Wednesday and Thursday, Friday tended to be fish (in milk or kedgeree) then Saturday was something deep fried (or potentially everything deep fried), spam and chips, spam egg and chips etc (Going a tad Monty Python) . Effectively spam was what existed before hamburgers or similar were invented for the UK market ( I seem to remember steaklets in the 70s)

[bungeejumper]

One thing, do you run any kind of business, or have a public webpage with your email address on, or share it with anyone else? Obviously, people who do ARE inevitably going to get Spam. OTOH, as with myself, I have no public webpage or display of my email address. It's just an ordinary private, single individual, email account.

I notice all your samples are finance related, could this not be a clue to the original source?

I found myself on what was clearly an international spamsuckers' list after hackers attacked a company where I'd recently bought something. (A large, market-dominating UK purveyor of electrical goods with very good lawyers.) The company insisted that the raiders hadn't snatched my payment details - just my name and email address - but once the stable door had been jemmied open, the spam began to make itself at home.

Much earlier, I was besieged for a while by boiler-room scamsters who had got hold of my mobile phone number. And the only organisations who'd had that phone number from me were (a) the London Stock Exchange, (b) Her Majesty's Customs and Excise, and (c) a certain very prominent business newspaper.

BJ