Spam

It is a big subject but I can try :-)

The tea bush/tree is an eastern Asian evergreen shrub (Camellia sinensis) which has fragrant, nodding, cup-shaped white flowers and glossy leaves. It likes to grow in tropical zones with quite a high rain fall.

It was first cultivated in ancient china where an infusion was made from it by steeping the leaves in boiling water. The leaves used for this are the top two leaves and the leaf bud picked from a growing shoot.

In order to make picking easier and to maximize the harvest the tea bushes are planted close together in rows and kept pruned to about waist height, to make a flat top (out of which the growing shoots emerge). A planting of tea is called a tea garden or tea plantation.

Since ancient times the best tea plants have been selected and cultivated by making cuttings called clones. Modern tea plantations will likely be clone plantings rather than plants grown from seed because tea made form clone plants will produce a higher quality more consistent manufactured product.

The process of making tea starts with picking the shoots and this is mainly done by hand by workers filling baskets strapped to their backs. The crop is then taken to the tea factory where is is weighed (growers and pickers are usually payed by weight)

The pickings are then spread out in thin lagers in a room full of perforated trays and warm air is passed through the trays to extract some moisture out of the leaves this step is called withering (the leaves are turned during this process).

The now soft, limp leaves are now passed through a machine (either a roller or a mincer) which breaks the cells in the tea leaf and cuts the leaf into small bits.

After this to make

Green tea: the leaves move on toe be completely dried (see below)

Black Tea: the leaves are placed in bins and allowed to ferment (oxidize and go brown rather like happens when you take a bite out of an apple and leave it).

Drying the Tea

Once the tea is ready for drying it is spread thinly on a conveyor and passed through an oven where hot air is used to remove all the remaining moisture form the prepared leaf the machine to do this is called a drier. With black tea it is important to stop the oxidation process quickly when the tea is ready for drying and to achieve this the drier is fitted with a 'hot feeder' conveyor.

When the tea comes out of the drier it is sorted and sieved to remove any stork that may have been introduced (by bad picking).

The teas is then packed into foil lined chests and these are shipped to the tea markets round the world where it is purchased and blended (with teas form other places) before being sold in shops

Green tea is more astringent than black tea and is usually mixed with other herbs (e.g. jasmine tea)

Black tea (much loved in England) is usually served with a splash of milk.

Gary Thuerk, a marketer, is generally credited with sending the first spam email on May 3, 1978. It wasn't well received, but he maintains that he did nothing wrong. Nowadays, spam makes up 53 percent of all emails.

Thuerk actually composed the fateful message on May 1st, but it didn't go out until a couple days later (that's why copies of the email show the earlier date). He sent it to about 400 people on ARPANET, an early precursor to the internet primarily used by scientists and researchers.

The goal of the message was to sell computers for DEC, an East Coast company that was attempting to build a presence on the West Coast. The company's newest computers offered ARPANET support right out of the box, and Thuerk thought that Arpanet users would appreciate the feature.

Here's part of the text of the email (and yes, it was written in all caps):

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM ND THE DECSYSTEM-10 COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM.

[...]

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.

Arpanet users immediately responded, annoyed that the message took up a sizable amount of space. Some questioned whether it was ethical to advertise on ARPANET, while a few were annoyed that they weren't included on the original message--the conversation was a huge talking point for the network's users, so some people felt left out.

Despite the mostly negative reaction, Thuerk managed to sell a few computers.

"The whole idea was tell as many people as possible," he told The Los Angeles Times in 2003. "Any other method--making phone calls, writing real letters--would have been much more expensive and taken much more time."

"I was the pioneer," he noted. "I saw a new way of doing things."

Still, he decided not to pursue the tactic on ARPANET, fearing a public relations disaster for his clients. For years, the network was free from spam.

Of course, that changed over time, and by the early 1990s, commercial email advertisements were commonplace, but they weren't called "spam." A software trainer named Joel Furr was the first person to use the word to refer to the ads, but he notes that the term was already in common usage in chat forums.

"In the early days of the internet, usage of the Net was restricted primarily to people who worked at or were students at universities," Furr told NPR. "Being university students, we were all very familiar with Monty Python."

In those days, chat rooms were...chaotic.

"It was just a lot of people typing all at once," Furr explained. "And when you would have 100 or more people all logged into these systems all at the same time, it could be very hard to follow what people were typing. It was like being in a room full of people all talking at once. And consequently whenever it got really noisy online, somebody would eventually start just typing, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam..."

That was a reference to a Monty Python sketch in which a man tries to order food at a restaurant; the cook gives him a list of meal options, all of which include the meat product Spam.

Furr says he was the first one to use the term to refer to mass advertisements on USENET groups; it quickly became shorthand for unwanted advertisements of any kind, and eventually, it became the go-to term for unwanted emails.

While spam blockers have gotten better, most of us still skim through a few unnecessary advertisements while checking our mail every day. We can thank Thuerk for starting the trend--and Furr for bringing us the terminology.