On August 22, 1993, a sixteen year-old Jack Dorsey logged onto the Stryder BBS ,which was located twenty miles from his home in St. Louis, and posted to a generic Usenet group.
“I am also looking for full access to internet for area code 314,” he wrote. “I am looking for something that is cheap also. Tahks[sic], please e-mail me!”
Dorsey was logged into the same BBS the following month and this time posted to a more noteworthy Usenet group: alt.security.pgp. His post was short and to the point. He simply wrote “KIBO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Kibo was a Usenet celebrity that designed a script to respond to any message that invoked his name, often times in spectacularly obnoxious fashion. The Usenet group itself was only a year-old at the time, created (September 15, 1992) shortly after PGP was invented by Philip Zimmerman in 1991. It attracted some familiar names as regular posters like Hal Finney and Adam Back, for example.
It’s impossible to say that Jack’s presence there was merely an accident as Usenet posts traced back to him as early as 1995 show he had already begun to use PGP. By then alt.security.pgp began to overlap heavily with the cypherpunk mailing list to the point where cypherpunk co-founder Tim May and Adam Back debated the merits of turning the mailing list into a Usenet newsgroup, a la alt.cypherpunks after seeing the success of alt.security.pgp and others. Notably, Jack was also a member of the cypherpunks. He was one of only 1,300 email addresses subscribed to the list in 1995, and he supported Adam Back’s RSA munition’s shirt campaign to the point that he wore one himself in his 1996 University of Missouri-Rolla yearbook photo.
Dorsey’s last known post to Usenet from the Stryder BBS was on May 28, 1994 in which he was still searching for permanent cheap access to the general internet.
“I’m looking for access in the 314 area code,” he wrote. “Please help. Cheap without an hourly fee is good. Full access please. Thanks.”