Spam (0.27 second Google search)
Spam is the use of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited bulk messages, especially advertising, indiscriminately. While the
most widely recognized form of spam is e-mail spam, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media.
According to the Internet Society and other sources, the term spam is derived from the 1970 Spam sketch of the BBC television comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus.[16]
In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat "Spam" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen. In early chat rooms services like PeopleLink and the early days of Online America (later known as America Online or AOL), they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python Spam sketch. With internet connections over phone lines, typically running at 1200 or even 300 bit/s, it could take an enormous amount of time for a spammy logo, drawn in ASCII art to scroll to completion on a viewer's terminal. Sending an irritating, large, meaningless block of text in this way was called spamming. This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It was also used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting. This act, previously called flooding or trashing, came to be known as spamming.[17] The term was soon applied to a large amount of text broadcast by many users.