[ih] "Father of e-Marketing"

Brian E Carpenter brian.e.carpenter at gmail.com
Sat Jun 1 18:55:05 PDT 2019


On 02-Jun-19 10:20, Clem cole wrote:
> The term definitely came from the Monty Python skit were the spammers (singing in the background) eventually drown out the primary message.

It's all over YouTube, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bW4vEo1F4E which also serves as a language lesson.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsgroup_spam dates the origin myth to 18 January 1994 ("Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon") but there's also a link to a page that claims that the term "spam" was first used in MUDs in the late 1980s, or even earlier on the BITNET Relay service from 1985. (So valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu might remember, if anybody knows him well enough to ask.)

Also see http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/09/how-the-word-spam-came-to-mean-junk-message/ 

   Brian

> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
> On Jun 1, 2019, at 5:42 PM, Joly MacFie <joly at punkcast.com <mailto:joly at punkcast.com>> wrote:
> 
>> I had thought SPAM was an acronym for Send Promo to All Mail or something similar. Am I mistaken?
>>
>> Myself I was a latecomer, but around 87 with the advent of MCI Mail and Easylink I used email to promote a music tv show called SNUB on Nightflight. The great thing was the Easylink interface to telex, which was how the music business communicated. I am sure many were less than impressed when my screeds ate up their office supplies.
>>
>> joly
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 1:16 PM Bill Ricker <bill.n1vux at gmail.com <mailto:bill.n1vux at gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>     On Sat, Jun 1, 2019 at 1:02 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com <mailto:clemc at ccc.com>> wrote:
>>
>>         Mumble -- Like most marketing, I think it depends on how you define it/when you start counting.  
>>
>>
>>     :-D
>>
>>         BTW;  I'm not sure where the term "spam" originated (other than the reference to Monty Python's skit to describe the issue).   I think it was somewhere in one of the netnews groups on the UUCP network actually (that was certainly where I first saw it and it was a bigger issue there since the links were dial-up).  Somebody like Mary Ann Horton might be a good person to ask about that.
>>
>>
>>     IIRC the first use of the term Spam wrto e-Marketing  was the Usenet repeated posting by a Greencard Lottery lawyer in the early 1980s, and explicitly was an allusion to the repetitive lyrics of the Pythons' spam spam spammity spam song.
>>
>>
>>     -- 
>>     Bill Ricker
>>     bill.n1vux at gmail.com <mailto:bill.n1vux at gmail.com>
>>     https://www.linkedin.com/in/n1vux 
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>> ---------------------------------------------------------------
>> Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
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