At the time, there was an arms race within the systems community to see who could flip a bigger bird to the organizers of the SCI spamference. David Mazieres and Eddie Kohler started it off when they submitted "Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List" [1] for publication. We wanted to one-up them and figured we could do so by submitting a random paper that might be accepted into the conference, allowing us to give an in-person talk. The plan worked up to a point, but when we asked the internet for $3k to send us to Orlando, the press and then the organizers of SCI caught wind and revoked the random paper they had previously accepted.

Everything since has been gravy. We're pumped that SCIgen is still a useful weapon against charlatans the world over (this now includes you, IEEE and Springer).

[1] http://www.scs.stanford.edu/~dm/home/papers/remove.pdf