The first command in the joke program was that the computer should print the word SPAM. The second command was to go back to the first command. The result was that the lyrics to the Monty Python song would be printed out as a screenful of SPAM. This would scroll down your screen forever and you couldn’t stop it. By 1990 SPAM had become programmers’ slang for anything unwanted on the internet. When the Monty Python joke was continued on Usenet in the early 1990s the word spam gained wider currency.
