Eternal September

Last updated

Eternal September or the September that never ended refers to a cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. [1] [2] Prior to this, the only sudden changes in the volume of new users of Usenet occurred each September, when cohorts of university students would gain access to it for the first time. The periodic flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. [3] Hence, from the early Usenet hobbyist point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless.

Contents

History

A 1994 t-shirt commemorating Eternal September Internet is Full - Go Away t-shirt.jpg
A 1994 t-shirt commemorating Eternal September

During the 1980s and early 1990s, Usenet and the Internet were generally the domain of dedicated computer professionals and hobbyists; new users joined slowly, in small numbers, and observed and learned the social conventions of online interaction without having much of an impact on the experienced users. The only exception to this was September of every year, when large numbers of first-year college students gained access to the Internet and Usenet through their universities. These large groups of new users who had not yet learned online etiquette created a nuisance for the experienced users, who came to dread September every year. Once ISPs like AOL made affordable Internet access widely available for home users, a continuous influx of new users began, making it feel like it was always "September" to the more experienced users. [4]

The full phrase appears to have evolved over a series of months on two separate alt.folklore newsgroups where a number of threads exist lamenting what they saw as an increase in low-quality posts across various newsgroups. Several members of the newsgroups referenced aspects of the "September" issue, typically in a joking manner.

In a thread on January 8, 1994, Joel Furr cross-posted asking "Is it just me, or has Delphi unleashed a staggering amount of weirdos on the net?", which garnered a reply from Karl Reinsch "Of course it's perpetually September for Delphi users, isn't it?" [5] The day before, Furr had also posted the same message to alt.folklore.urban, where David Fischer responded with a joke call-to-action where he referred to the increasing numbers of Delphi users as the "Never-Ending-September". [6] Fischer also replied to a different thread on January 25, 1994, in alt.folklore.computers saying, "It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net history as the September that never ended." [7] [8] This quote has been suggested to have been the first reference. [9]

Possibly the first use of the "Eternal September" phrase was a newsgroup post by John William Chambless in February 1994. He posted a rant including some excerpts of low-quality articles he found in one of his newsgroups that day, but titled the post "The Eternal September". [10]

Legacy

A tongue-in-cheek program called sdate outputs the current date, formatted using the Eternal September calendar (September X, 1993, where X is an unbounded counter for days since that epoch). [11] This is not the identically named sdate, one of the sixty commands that comes with the First Edition of Unix, that is used to set the system clock. [12] Named with similar humour is one of the free public Usenet servers, Eternal-September.org. [13]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James "Kibo" Parry</span> American Usenetter

James Parry, commonly known by his nickname and username Kibo, is a Usenetter known for his sense of humor, various surrealist net pranks, an absurdly long signature, and a machine-assisted knack for "kibozing": joining any thread in which "kibo" was mentioned. His exploits have earned him a multitude of enthusiasts, who celebrate him as the head deity of the parody religion "Kibology", centered on the humor newsgroup alt.religion.kibology.

A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from users in different locations using the Internet. They are discussion groups and are not devoted to publishing news. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on the World Wide Web. Newsreader software is used to read the content of newsgroups.

rn is a news client written by Larry Wall and originally released in 1984. It was one of the first newsreaders to take full advantage of character-addressable CRT terminals. Previous newsreaders, such as readnews, were mostly line-oriented and designed for use on the printing terminals which were common on the early Unix minicomputers where the Usenet software and network originated. Later variants of the original rn program included rrn, trn, and strn.

The Penet remailer was a pseudonymous remailer operated by Johan "Julf" Helsingius of Finland from 1993 to 1996. Its initial creation stemmed from an argument in a Finnish newsgroup over whether people should be required to tie their real name to their online communications. Julf believed that people should not—indeed, could not—be required to do so. In his own words:

alt.religion.scientology was a Usenet newsgroup started in 1991 to discuss the controversial beliefs of Scientology and the activities of the Church of Scientology. The newsgroup became the focal point of an aggressive campaign known as Scientology versus the Internet, which took place online and in the courts.

Serdar Argic was the alias used in one of the first automated newsgroup spam incidents on Usenet, with the objective of denying the Armenian genocide.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sporgery</span> Posting a flood of articles to a Usenet group, with falsified headers

Sporgery is the disruptive act of posting a flood of articles to a Usenet newsgroup, with the article headers falsified so that they appear to have been posted by others. The word is a portmanteau of spam and forgery, coined by German software developer, and critic of Scientology, Tilman Hausherr.

An online service provider (OSP) can, for example, be an Internet service provider, an email provider, a news provider (press), an entertainment provider, a search engine, an e-commerce site, an online banking site, a health site, an official government site, social media, a wiki, or a Usenet newsgroup.

alt.sex is a Usenet newsgroup – a discussion group within the Usenet network – relating to human sexual activity. It was popular in the 1990s. An October 1993 survey by Brian Reid reported an estimated worldwide readership for the alt.sex newsgroup of 3.3 million, that being 8% of the total Usenet readership, with 67% of all Usenet "nodes" carrying the group. At that time, alt.sex had an estimated traffic of 2,300 messages per month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Groups</span> Service from Google that provides discussion groups

Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. Until February 2024, the Groups service also provided a gateway to Usenet newsgroups, both reading and posting to them, via a shared user interface. In addition to accessing Google groups, registered users can also set up mailing list archives for e-mail lists that are hosted elsewhere.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shell account</span> User account on a remote server

A shell account is a user account on a remote server, typically running under Unix or Linux operating systems. The account gives access to a text-based command-line interface in a shell, via a terminal emulator. The user typically communicates with the server via the SSH protocol. In the early days of the Internet, one would connect using a modem.

Forté Agent was an email and Usenet news client used on the Windows operating system. Agent was conceived, designed and developed by Mark Sidell and the team at Forté Internet Software in 1994 to address the need for an online/offline newsreader which capitalized on the emerging Windows GUI framework. By 1995, Agent had expanded to become a full-featured email client and remains a widely used application for integrating news and email communication on Windows. Agent supports POP email but not IMAP.

tin (newsreader)

tin is an open-source, text-based, threaded newsreader, used to read and post messages on Usenet, the worldwide distributed discussion system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joel Furr</span>

Joel K. "Jay" Furr is an American writer and software trainer, notable as a Usenet personality in the early and mid-1990s.

alt.atheism is a Usenet newsgroup within the alt.* hierarchy that discusses atheism. The group was originally created on February 6, 1990 by a member of the alt.pagan newsgroup, to provide an alternative forum for the numerous discussions on atheism that were overwhelming the pagan group. A survey of usenet groups in 1994–1995 found that, among 70 groups discussing "consciousness, spirituality, and religion ", it was the group with the highest traffic volume. Nash (2002) writes that "atheist and freethought newsgroups" including alt.atheism have "done much to remove the sense of isolation felt by many with antireligious opinions".

Christopher Lewis is a Canadian computer security consultant from Ottawa, who fought spam on Usenet and the early Internet. Active in volunteer anti-spam efforts in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Lewis was described in Net.wars (1997) as "the best known active canceler of spam and other mass postings" at the time. In April 1998, he organized an unsuccessful moratorium with forty other anti-spam volunteers in an attempt to boycott internet service providers into doing their share against spam. He worked as a systems architect for Nortel and, as of 2017, is Chief Scientist at SpamhausTechnology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TJ-2</span>

TJ-2 was published by Peter Samson in May 1963 and is thought to be the first page layout program. Although it lacks page numbering, page headers and footers, TJ-2 is the first word processor to provide a number of essential typographic alignment and automatic typesetting features:

A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Usenet</span> Worldwide computer-based distributed discussion system

Usenet, USENET, or, "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.

Computer Currents was a freely distributed United States computer magazine, with local editions across the country. It was often described as a resource for computer shoppers and users, and compared to other regional computer magazines like MicroTimes.

References

  1. ↑ Eric Raymond. "September that never ended". The Jargon File (version 4.4.7). Archived from the original on September 14, 2008.
  2. ↑ Grossman, Wendy M. (1997). "The Year September Never Ended". Net.wars. New York University Press. pp. 4–17, 31–41. ISBN   978-0-8147-3103-1. OCLC   37451759. Archived from the original on June 26, 2006.
  3. ↑ Grossman, Wendy M. (1997). "The Making of an Underclass: AOL". Net.wars. New York University Press. pp. 31–41. ISBN   978-0-8147-3103-1. OCLC   37451759. Archived from the original on May 5, 2011.
  4. ↑ Koebler, Jason (September 30, 2015). "It's September, Forever".
  5. ↑ "Run! It's the Delphioids!". Newsgroup:  alt.folklore.computers. January 8, 1994. Retrieved January 9, 2022.
  6. ↑ "Run! It's the Delphioids!". Newsgroup:  alt.folklore.urban. January 12, 1994. Retrieved January 9, 2022.
  7. ↑ "longest USENET thread ever". Newsgroup:  alt.folklore.computers. January 25, 1994. Retrieved January 9, 2022.
  8. ↑ Isaacson, Walter (2014). The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Simon & Schuster. p. 401. ISBN   978-1476708690.
  9. ↑ Koebler, Jason (September 30, 2015). "It's September, Forever". Vice . Archived from the original on December 13, 2017.
  10. ↑ "The Eternal September". Newsgroup:  alt.folklore.computers. February 8, 1994. Retrieved January 10, 2022.
  11. ↑ "Never Ending September Date – df7cb.de". df7cb.de. Archived from the original on February 2, 2009.
  12. ↑ "sdate(1) – Unix First Edition Manual Page". cat-v.org. Archived from the original on May 30, 2014.
  13. ↑ "www.eternal-september.org". www.eternal-september.org.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.