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President Clinton announced that the scrambling of GPS (known as Selective Availability) would be cut off and cilivians could use GPS (Global Positioning System).
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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.
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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!
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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.
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Matt Stum suggests the new name geacaching instead of the term "stashing" because of the negative cononotations to the word.
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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.
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In Austin, Texas the first ever geocaching get together was held.
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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.
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By mid-2003 geocaching.com had reached over 150,000 users and around 7,000 paid subcribers.
