I see that I’m part of the 20-year Google Usenet timeline!

I also noticed that it was not, in fact, the first instance of my stating Godwin’s Law, although for some reason it seems to be the first instance that Google could dig out of DejaNews. (Maybe there was some copyright-law violation that got the earlier references purged?) In any case, J. Eric Townsend’s query makes clear he’d heard of it before. My conservative guess, now reified in a ten-year-old Wired column, was that I came up with Godwin’s Law in 1990. It is of course the inspiration for the name of this blog.

I originally named Godwin’s Law “Godwin’s Rule,” and you can still find references to it by that name. But early on I decided that, since I was a lawyer, “there oughta be a law.”

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