Eternal September

In Usenet slang, Eternal September (or the September that never ended)^[1] began in September 1993,^[2] the month that Internet service provider America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands, and later millions, of users. Before then, every year in September, a large number of new university freshmen acquired access to Usenet for the first time, and took some time to become accustomed to Usenet's standards of conduct and "netiquette". But, after a month or so, these new users would learn the networks' social norms or simply tire of using the service. However, for the pre-existing users of Usenet, the influx of new users from September 1993 onwards was a new and endless manifestation of the phenomenon.

This was in part because the service providers (such as AOL) made little effort to educate their users about Usenet customs, but it was also because of the large scale and seemingly endless intake of new users. Whereas the regular September freshman influx would quickly settle down, Usenet's existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer and endless number of new users and so they overwhelmed the network's existing social norms.^[3]

Since then, the rise in popularity of the Internet has brought on a constant stream of new users. Thus, from the point of view of the pre-1993 Usenet users, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended. The term was used by Dave Fischer in a January 26, 1994, post to alt.folklore.computers, "It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended."^[4]

In homage to the term, one news server, formerly named Motzarella.org,^[5] now calls itself Eternal September and gives the date as a running tally of days since September 1993.^[6]

References

External links

• TheSeptemberThatNeverEnded at MeatballWiki
• Sdate, a Unix program that outputs the date of Never Ending September