Students and professors, let’s ring in this fall semester with a tid-bit of Internet history. As you may already know, the Internet has it’s origins in the defense industry.  Afterall, it was APRANET [a (D)ARPA project] before it was the Internet. However besides being a military endeavor, it was also an academic one. Usenet, “the poor man’s ARPANET”, was created in 1980 at Duke University. It became wildly popular within the academic community and birthed many Internet terms still in use today, Flood, Spam, Troll and FAQ, among others.  But what of the forgotten ones?

Eternal September (also September that never ended)[1] is a Usenet slang expression, coined by Dave Fischer, for the period beginning September 1993.[2] The expression encapsulates the belief that an endless influx of new users (newbies) since that date has continuously degraded standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet and the wider Internet.

wikipedia

To discuss this with the author, tweet @stephenbalaban.

Or go back to the home page.