On the evening of October 23, 1990 electronic mail messages started to pour into the computers at the Duke University Computer Science Department. Teams of programmers from all over the world were registering to compete in the first global (as far as the authors are aware) programming contest to be held on the Internet. During the three-hour competition, modeled after the annual ACM scholastic programming contest, 60 teams from 37 institutions in 5 countries attempted to solve a set of six programming problems using C or Pascal. Their solutions were sent by electronic mail to Duke, where their programs were judged and the results returned by electronic mail. At the conclusion of the contest, 330 program submissions had been judged and 65 clarification requests were answered.