what's your fav bit of early web history
eternal september. it's kind of the starting gun of my entire life, and i never even knew it until i had been an active participant for over a decade. the first time i was online it was fall of 1997, and eternal september had already been underway for four years.
it was when internet service providers of the era began to broadly offer usenet access to their users. usenet was how we bothered each other online before forums or IRC or youtube comments or tweets. per wikipedia, new and inexperienced internet users flooded onto usenet.
usenet users were usually only expecting a crapflood of new users at the beginning of the fall college semester, because it was only colleges that had access to that kind of thing, pre-1993. now there were new users Every God Damn Day, and it really weirded up the flow of interpersonal communication.
this of course changed the expectation for how people were going to behave online, how webmasters needed to run their sites, and created the internet as we came to know it for about twenty years.
it led to "web 2.0," which was for the longest time the internet that millennials remember, where it's collaborative, full of user-generated content, and was kind of a burgeoning new third space, right there in your living room. in the cabinet. you know, the big wooden cabinet you had, where the computer lived.
it also led to like, SomethingAwful and the bodybuilding forums where they debated over how many days are in a week, and eventually 4chan- which, love it or hate it, was one of the iconic pillars of global human interaction before the behind-the-scenes conservative takeover in the 2010s.
all because you could suddenly get usenet at home, and annoy people who had been using it for years.
it's currently September 11,976, 1993. wild.












