Eternal September

There is no original to identify: this spread through many separate posts at once rather than from a first one. ViralWorld holds no copy of it either — what it was, when it spread and what people called it is the record.

Nothing here is claimed to be the first version of this, because research established there was not one — it appeared in many places at once.

Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.

What happens

Every September a new intake of students reached Usenet, learned the etiquette over a few weeks and settled down. When AOL opened a Usenet gateway in 1993 the intake stopped ending. David Fischer's post of 25 January 1994 is the earliest known use of the phrase: September 1993 will go down in net history as the September that never ended.