History
The conspiracy theory was first made public in a posting to the newsgroup de.talk.bizarre on May 16, 1994, by Achim Held, a student of computer science at the University of Kiel. From there, it spread throughout the German-speaking Internet community and has lost little of its popularity, even after 18 years.
In a television interview conducted for the 10th anniversary of the newsgroup posting, Held stated that this myth definitely originated from his Usenet posting which was intended only as a joke. According to Held, the idea for the conspiracy theory formed in his mind at a student party while speaking to an avid reader of New Age magazines.
There are a number of conflicting theories about the reasons behind the joke's gain in popularity, the most popular being a flame war between Usenet admins and the Bielefeld based Z-Netz BBS about text encodings.
Read more about this topic: Bielefeld Conspiracy
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The only history is a mere question of one’s struggle inside oneself. But that is the joy of it. One need neither discover Americas nor conquer nations, and yet one has as great a work as Columbus or Alexander, to do.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)