I plan to make the change on Tuesday
unless something horrible happens.
Horton's message was a response to a previous post, the intact original of which is now lost to history, from one "sdcarl!rusty," aka Rusty Wright. With this incomplete fragment of a cryptic exchange, the history of Usenet, as we have it today, begins.
Advertisement:
The message is the oldest Usenet posting in the 20-year archive, now searchable on Google. It's the first of some 700 million posts that provide a record spanning the early history to the present of Usenet -- the sprawling public bulletin board, composed of a vast hierarchy of newsgroups, that grew up alongside the Internet itself.