Why is electronic spam called spam?

Tons of extra and meaningless information are attacking us while using the Internet. We are used to calling it spam. But where does this word come from?

The term spam is derived from the 1970 Spam sketch of the BBC comedy series Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch is set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes Spam canned luncheon meat. Then the Vikings' song come: "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam… lovely Spam! wonderful Spam!", hence "Spamming" the dialogue.In those time, a great amounts of canned meat products were imported to the United Kingdom, and they were prevailing in the food markets. After the appearance of this sketch, the word spam gained a new meaning, which later became loved by online population.

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' messages or announcements off the screen and make them leave the chat room. That's why large blocks of meaningless text became known as spam, and the process of sending them was called spamming. Soon the term spam was applied to define different cases of multiple posting, such as annoying advertisement e-mails, and nowadays the word is familiar to every web user.