SPAM or spam?

Spam (officially trademarked as SPAM, an acronym of "Spiced Ham") is a canned precooked meat product made by the Hormel Foods Corporation. The labeled ingredients in the classic variety of Spam are chopped pork shoulder meat with ham meat added, salt, water, modified potato starch as a binder, and sodium nitrite as a preservative.

Spam® was first marketed in 1937. By 2001, Hormel had produced more than 6 billion cans and shipped them around the world. Hawaiians are the biggest consumers of Spam®, downing 6.7 million cans a year, or an average of 5.5 cans per resident per year.

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The first commercial e-mail to be sent to a large group of users (who had not requested it or did not necessarily want the information) is widely attributed to Digital Equipment Corporation. On May 2, 1978, an employee of DEC (now owned by Hewlett-Packard) sent an email announcing a new product to several hundred people on what was then the ARPANET, an early, government-sponsored version of what we now know as the Internet.

Thus, the first spam e-mail was not about Viagra or lower mortgages, but rather:

WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH. THE LOCATIONS WILL BE:

TUESDAY, MAY 9, 1978 - 2 PM
HYATT HOUSE (NEAR THE L.A. AIRPORT)
LOS ANGELES, CA

THURSDAY, MAY 11, 1978 - 2 PM
DUNFEY'S ROYAL COACH
SAN MATEO, CA (4 MILES SOUTH OF S.F. AIRPORT AT BAYSHORE, RT 101 AND RT 92)

A 2020 WILL BE THERE FOR YOU TO VIEW. ALSO TERMINALS ON-LINE TO OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 SYSTEMS THROUGH THE ARPANET. IF YOU ARE UNABLE TO ATTEND, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO CONTACT THE NEAREST DEC OFFICE FOR MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXCITING DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY.

The message was met with much resistance from the ARPANET community and was considered a violation of both the rules and the spirit of the network. But you know the rest of the story. The community lost and commerce won.