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Cilvian Use of GPS
President Clinton announced that the scrambling of GPS (known as Selective Availability) would be cut off and cilivians could use GPS (Global Positioning System). -
David Ulmer created the first Geocache
David Ulmer decided to celebrate the demise of the SA by hiding a bucket of trinkets in the woods in Portland, Oregon. He announced the location online in a newsgroup. This was the first ever geocache. It even included the container, the trinkets, the log book, and the rule of take something - leave something. -
Mike Teague starts a website for the locations
Mike Teague decides to announce a website where all of the gecaching locations can be kept.Unfortunately that page is now gone, but there is a record of homepage! -
James Coburn sets up the first mailing list.
James Coburn decides to set up the first mailing list through eGroups (what is not Yahoo) to start the discussion of gecaching. This maling group still exists today. -
"Stash" to "Cache"
Matt Stum suggests the new name geacaching instead of the term "stashing" because of the negative cononotations to the word. -
Jeremy Irish sets up the official geocaching.com website.
Jeremey Irish decided to get a domain space and set up the official website for geocaching.He contacted Mike Teague to get all of the caches to enter into his database. -
The first ever get together geocaching.
In Austin, Texas the first ever geocaching get together was held. -
Irish continues to expand
Irish extended geocaching.com's business model more directly into the pay-to-play world, despite a pledge to keep the game "free" and "non-commercial." Besides the banner ads, clothing sales, and sales of geocaching log books, bumper stickers, decals, etc., he now introduced "members-only caches" and fee-based hitchhiker logging. The members-only caches were accessible only to those who paid a $30/year membership fee. -
Geocaching.com is doing well.
By mid-2003 geocaching.com had reached over 150,000 users and around 7,000 paid subcribers.
