Ancience, aka The Early History of Netiquette
Someone wrote "... on the Arpanet in 1979, we sure didn't have
all these "rules" like we seem to have today."
This spurred me to do a little research [1], because I had a vague
recollection (or unfounded conviction) that netiquette[2] docs had started
to show up earlier than that. I had been familiar with the net since
about a decade earlier [3], and the above quote led me to take a
diverting web-walk down memory lane. My goal was to see what
easy-to-find evidence might fix a date for when "rules for net use"
or "netiquette" started to appear.
By most accounts [5], the term "netiquette" itself was coined by
Chuq von Rospach around 1983, but I'm not really looking for the
origin of that term. I'm looking instead for some of the earliest
sets of written rules, guidelines, behavior norms, "common sense",
"distilled wisdom", or FAQs that pertain to email, mailing list,
and usenet posting behavior.
One thing I turned up implies that some netiquette document
existed "before 1983":
Chuq von Rospach wrote [6] in 1986: "A couple of years back
[...] I rewrote the etiquette doc for USENET." [I (dal) think
the result was
"A Primer on How to Work With the Usenet Community" [7],
co-maintained by Gene Spafford for many
years thereafter.] The use of "rewrote" implies that there
were some earlier etiquette docs for USENET.
I found a "Netiquette" article in a Maryland legal newsletter [8]
that claims
"For you history buffs, netiquette was started at a Xerox facility
called PARC — Palo Alto Research Center — in the 1970's.
They developed e-mail etiquette to help employees learn to handle
the new e-mail system. It was called the Electronic Briefing Blurb."
However, the almost complete absence of that phrase "Electronic
Briefing Blurb" on the web was casting some doubt in my mind on
the claim, until I removed the quotes and found another article
[9]
that called it the "Electronic Mail Briefing Blurb". It's still a
very rare term on the web, possibly because the Xerox company's
corporate paranoia limited the influence of that document.
Another question that this search brought up: in 1986, USENET's
"Great
Renaming" occurred. I've found the wikipedia article, a
Great Renaming FAQ, and a few other references to it, but have
not found the table of what older newsgroup names were renamed
into what new names. In particular for the purposes of this
posting, the question is whether anything like
news.announce.newusers existed before the 1986 Great Renaming.
The admin site for that newsgroup [10] says that it "was created"
as a part of the Great Renaming, but that wording doesn't really
nail down whether any analogue existed before then.
Finally, here are a couple bonus net history links that I
uncovered during my travels today:
Notes:
11:57:33 PM
Random radio Weblog