Eternal September or the September that never ended was 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.
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?" 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. Named with similar humour is one of the free public Usenet servers, Eternal-September.org.
See also
- Dead Internet theory
- Enshittification
- July effect
- Sturgeon's law
- Tragedy of the commons
References
External links
- sdate, a Unix program that outputs the date of Never Ending September