What is surfing the internet?

Early USENET Surfing
Although my article was independently conceived and written in the early months of 1992, and submitted in mid-March, others were thinking along the same metaphorical lines. A handful of earlier uses have turned up in Usenet archives, recently made available by the search engine Google. <http://groups.google.com />

Mark McCahill, father of the Internet Gopher protocol, can be credited with first known Usenet usage of the exact phrase, "surfing the internet." [Ed. Note: For the record, I didn't have Usenet access at the time I wrote my article back in 1992, so I never knew of Mark's use of it until 12-12-01, when I read about Google's new expanded Usenet archive.]    
Mark's post:    
" 24 Feb 1992 by "Mark P. McCahill"    
Newsgroups: alt.gopherView:    
.... There is a lot to be said for...surfing the internet with gopher from anywhere that you can find a phone jack....."

On Dec. 12, 2001 I informed Mark of his "first post" rights. He said,    
"I can tell you why I used the phrase. One of my favorite sports is windsurfing, so 'surfing' is never far from my mind... that and extending the 'channel surfing' metaphor to the internet because we thought that browsing was an important way of finding information. If you have ever seen my garage (I think there are 8 or 10 sailboards there) or my office (1 board) know why I would say something about surfing the internet."

A few days earlier than McCahill's original post, on February 18, 1992, Charles Bailey posted to bit.listserv.pacs-l and wrote about the "virtual library." He said, "Doing it right seems to imply building a library-wide network of microcomputer workstations that is linked to external networks (e.g., the campus LAN and Internet). It also implies providing local servers (e.g., networked CD-ROM databases, OPAC, and locally mounted citation, full-text, and multimedia databases) and 'seamless' connectivity to remote servers (e.g., remote OPACs, CARL UnCover2, and OCLC FirstSearch). Creating an easy-to-use interface to these diverse heterogeneous resources will not be a trivial task. Even if we don't try to fully support users as they 'surf' the networks, end-user support costs will increase as the library provides access to a growing number of information servers."

There's also use of the term "going net-surfing" which turns up in a June 6, 1991 comp.admin.policy post by Brendan Kehoe.    
"...Here's a question: how do other people deal with users that they *think*    
are doing no-nos around the net? One of our users had the habit of    
occasionally going net-surfing and doing the hit-and-run type of    
attempts (trying 'guest' usually)..."

In January 1992, Kehoe released Zen and the Art of the Internet<http://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html>, arguably the first Internet guide aimed at non-techie end users. It does not talk about "surfing the net" at all. Kehoe used the words "explore" and "search" and "use" when referring to what one did on the Internet of that era.

I have not found earlier usage of surfing (surf*) and the Internet (*net) on the Usenet archive at Google, but it's possible that there are some in there that have so far escaped my extensive searches.