Eternal September refers to September of 1993, the time when AOL started offering Usenet access. This date is important, because prior to that, Usenet was mainly (but not entirely) the domain of universities and research institutions, as home internet was still extremely nascent. People on usenet used to bitch about "September" because that was the start of fall semester, which is when many incoming freshmen would experience the internet for the very first time, and thus discourse on BBSes and Usenet groups would plummet as people were slow to become acclimated to proto-web culture. People would either quickly assimilate to usenet culture of the time, or kind of be driven off the internet.
Once AOL started giving access to usenet with their service, "September never ended." Every month, you'd have new users signing up for AOL, which would bring endless n00bs to usenet.
I was around during those days, my dad got compuserve in the late 80's. Because we were the extremely rare group that was part of usenet culture outside of universities and research institutions prior to September of 1993, we always found it insulting. The elitism regarding "eternal september" was that anybody without a university email address would be looked down upon. We paid for a compuserve and later netscape email address at the time, and thus we'd have insinuations that we were new to the internet despite having been around for years at that point.
This is a bit of forgotten internet culture clash, but one my dad still brings up. Were you there for Eternal September?
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