We’re now 33 years into Eternal September. You have to be older than about 52 to know what I’m talking about. But if you started college before the fall of 1993, especially if you were studying computer science, you know all about the September that never ended. And no, it’s not some kind of followup to that Beach Boys’ compilation album called Endless Summer. It doesn’t have anything to do with that Green Day song either. Instead, it’s a phase of the life of the Internet.
What happened in September
Every August, legions of new first-year college students arrived on college campuses. And inevitably, by September, a large percentage of them discovered the Internet. As the 1980s turned to the 90s, an increasing number of college professors used the Internet as an extension of the classroom, a way for students to interact with each other, the teaching assistants, and the professor. It cut down on the quantity of office hours they had to keep.
When I started college, one of my early assignments was literally to walk to a building on the edge of campus, show my student ID, fill out a form, and get an e-mail address activated. It was kind of like registering to vote.
For some students, their Internet usage consisted of e-mail and little else. But it wasn’t long before some would discover the other things the Internet had to offer, like FTP for file transfers, IRC for chat, and Usenet for discussion groups, maybe even the World Wide Web. And then they’d tell their friends, who would tell their friends, and soon the Internet was flooded with legions of n00bs who didn’t know online etiquette or how any of it worked.
But after a few months, most of them learned. As for the rest, some lost interest, some dropped out and lost their access, and some of them learned too, just a bit slower than others. Eventually things returned to normal.
What was different about September 1993
But then 1993 happened. The incoming class wasn’t abnormally large that year or anything. But word of the Internet was getting around, and demand for it outside of college students was growing. Parallel online worlds existed, and they had existed since the late 1970s, but they were walled gardens, entities unto themselves. The Internet was open. These online services like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy realized they couldn’t compete with that. One by one, they made the decision to connect to the Internet, and hope they could survive by making the Internet easy. And soon, horror of horrors, politicians were talking about it.
The result was floods of AOL accounts suddenly gained Internet access. It wasn’t just AOL accounts, but AOL had a particularly bad reputation. And because people would sign up for AOL for the first time at any given time, this meant the flood of newcomers was no longer limited to September. That’s why September 1993 was the September that never ended.
The dawn of the Internet era
It’s hard to pinpoint when the Internet era or the dotcom era began. But Eternal September is when the Internet started becoming mainstream. And that meant it would never be the same again. It’s like when you know about something, and not a lot of other people do, but then you start seeing new people you’ve never seen before. And the next week, there are even more new people. And the more time goes on, the more it’s clear your secret is no longer a secret anymore. It’s mainstream, something lots of people know about.
That’s what 1993 felt like to the people already online. To those discovering the Internet in 1993, it was like finding a new world you didn’t know existed. It seemed like participating in a revolution. In a way, it was participating in a revolution.
Things were never the same for those who were online before the September that never ended. But they were never the same for those who came online that year either.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.