in the late 1980s the internet was a spry and wonderful thing. there were a number of methods for querying remote servers – gopher, archie, ftp, even the lowly finger command. this hyper-text transport protocol thing was just starting to take off, but the two staples of the network were the smtp protocol – email – and the uucp protocol, internet news known as usenet. those of you a little less beardy in the internet might know usenet as ‘google groups’, since they bought out the dejanews archives some time ago.

i cut my chops on usenet after moving up from the bulletin board systems in my hometown, but most people were first exposed to them when they arrived their first day at university.

the internet has it’s own set of customs and traditions, and it works smoothly as long as they are reasonably followed. make sure you quote part of the message you are replying to. don’t reply to list when you mean to reply to someone personally. don’t be a tremendous asshole. spellcheck. etcetera. that the internet works at all is largely a social phenomenon more than a technological one.

each september a new set of students would show up, get their accounts, and immediately begin breaking every single one of these rules. after a while they’d get bored, banned, or they’d learn from the regulars how to fit in and behave on the ‘information superhighway’ and things would return to normalcy for another eleven months.

in 1993 all of this changed. america on-line connected it’s online service with the internet. suddenly thousands of new users flooded onto the network and there was no hope of slowly educating them into becoming productive members of society. this was the beginning of the end for public conversation on the internet. every day aol found new members to sign up, and most of them went right to the first thing they could find – newsgroups are of a like to the chatrooms aol had previously popularized – and immediately posted “hey what’s up i’m on the internet!”.

thus was born the term “endless september.”

the historical endless september actually ended on 25th january 2005 (september 4165, 1993) when aol disconnected it’s service from usenet. of course with the propagation of the internet throughout the world, the growth of the internet will never really get back to that slow trickle of college students once a year.