People weren't polite on the internet in the 90s! There was plenty of trolls even back then. Plenty of spam too.

I'm ashamed to admit this but I even wrote software what ran on Windows 95 and would spam chat rooms with thousands of phrases generated on the fly from a dictionary. The intention was it would run over a RAT (also of my creation) and get other people booted off the chat room. ie the spam would be posted by other people in chat rooms against their will and channel admins would then kick them. I wrote this because at college we "only" had dual ISDN lines and kids in chat rooms would slow down my warez downloads.

I know, I know, the justification is worse than the tool itself. But we were young, I've grown up since and these days the lessons I've learned from my college exploits are put to good use :)