This was in part because the new internet service providers such as AOL made little effort to educate their users about Usenet customs, but it was also because of the large scale and seemingly endless intake of new users. Whereas the regular September freshman influx would quickly settle down, Usenet's existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer and endless number of new users and so they overwhelmed the network's existing social norms.[3]
Since then, the rise in popularity of the Internet has brought on a constant stream of new users. Thus, from the point of view of the pre-1993 Usenet users, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended. The term was used by Dave Fischer in a January 26, 1994, post to alt.folklore.computers, "It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net.history as the September that never ended."[4]
In homage to the term, one news server, formerly named Motzarella.org,[5] now calls itself Eternal September and gives the date as a running tally of days since September 1993.[6]
A tongue-in-cheek program called sdate outputs the current date, formatted using the Eternal September calendar (September X, 1993, with X an unbounded counter for days since the beginning of that epoch).[7] This should not be confused with the identically named sdate, one of the sixty commands that came with the First Edition of Unix, that was used to set the system clock.[8]