A brief history of spam, spam, spam

As I was going through my backlog of New Yorker issues, I came upon this interesting article on spam or junk mail.

This is how I discovered (I was probably the last person in the world not to know that), that the first junk mail was sent as an advertisement for DEC in 1978 and that the word "spam" is a contraction of "spiced ham" (not being a fan of ham may partly explain my ignorance, but still, mea culpa).

So, from "spiced ham", the product, to spam, what litters our mail boxes, what is the missing link?

This Monty Pythons' skit, but of course. Not sure how many times "spam" is said in the 3-minute sketch, but enough to persuade us of the relevance of the term to indicate something that comes again and again, at one's annoyance.

In addition to the New Yorker article, you can also see here for a more detailed history of spam.