Happy 11th Birthday, Geocaching! Traditional Cache
Happy 11th Birthday, Geocaching!
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Terrain:
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Size: 
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Happy 11th Birthday Geocaching!
GPS, or Global Positioning System, was developed by the US Department of Defense. This satellite navigation system was intended for military use and therefore the signals were scrambled, limiting accuracy for civilian use to about 100 meters. On May 1, 2000, President Clinton announced that this scrambling, known as Selective Availability (SA), would be turned off. Civilians were then able to enjoy accuracy on the order of 10 meters.
On May 3, 2000, Dave Ulmer proposed a way to celebrate the demise of SA. He hid a bucket of trinkets in the woods outside Portland, Oregon and announced its location in a posting made to the USENET newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav. This announcement is remarkable for laying out the essence of the hobby that is still in place today. It's all there. The container. The trinkets. The log book. The rule of take something, leave something, sign the logbook. Dave Ulmer invented geocaching in one fell swoop in that newsgroup posting.
Within a day, the original stash had been found. Within days, more stashes had been hidden in California, Kansas, and Illinois. Within a month, a stash had been hidden as far away as Australia. The hobby was fast on its way to being a worldwide phenomenon.
On May 8, Mike Teague announced a Web site for collecting the locations of caches. The original Web page is gone, but thanks to the Wayback Machine, a copy of the GPS Stash Hunt Homepage still exists.
On May 15, James Coburn set up a mailing list on eGroups (now Yahoo!) for discussion of geocaching. The list is still in existence. Its archives contain the best record of the early days of the hobby.
On May 30, a new name was coined for the hobby. Matt Stum suggested "geocaching" to avoid the negative connotations of the word "stash".
So, within a month, the hobby had in place the rules, its first hides and finds, a mailing list and a home page. And the number of caches was growing fast.
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While this is not a requirement, I'd LOVE to hear how you heard about geocaching. Do you do anything special for geocaching's birthday, or for your own geo-versary? Feel free to post that in your cache log after you find this simple, classic hide.
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Treasures
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