I was around for the AOL days.
My memory of the early board is a little fuzzy, but I think that at first there weren’t even threads, just post titles, e.g., –
“Why is the speed of light a universal constant?”, * UKReader*, 4/1/98 12:16:04 PM
“Hey, Cecil, I Am Smarter”, * Dimbulb*, 4/1/98 12:19:34 PM
“re: Hey Cecil, I Am Smarter”, Rafaello234, 4/1/98 12:29:01 PM
Then came the “new” AOL board, which had a background of pastel push pins on a corkboard, and which had real threads.
There were only two forums, “General Questions” and “Comments on Cecils Column”. When you opened them, you would only see the threads that had posts since the last time you’d logged in, unless you clicked a button to show all posts since (specified date). So you’d open a thread and only see the new posts in the thread, not the entire thread. Therefore everyone but the newbies would copy and paste from the posts they were replying to, since people could not necessarily simply scroll up and read earlier posts in the same thread to see what they were replying to.
AOL’s formatting allowed for color and size, and also background color. Some newbies would come in and post in 18 point bold red on a fuchsia background and everyone would complain that it hurt our eyes.
There was indeed an overlap – I registered for the new board but the action was still on the old one, which persisted for awhile longer than they’d said it would.
JessEnigma:
Well, not quite. The actual official original AOL board was fully killed off unless you know something I don’t; but in the period between the announcement that the board would be killed and the coalescing of the community around the new message board at straightdope.com, we weren’t sure where we were going to reconvene – alt.straightdope? alt.fans.cecil.adams? a new board at straightdope.com?
One candidate was a separate unofficial SDMB-2 board on AOL! I don’t recall how it was set up, or why AOL was open to that while uninterested in keeping the main AOL SDMB, but the SDMB-2 board was set up and I went there for awhile before it became apparent that the community was coming together here. Anyway, I’m pretty sure it is the SDMB-2 board that still exists in a kind of limbo like a ghost town, not the authentic original. A few people still post there, including some old regulars from the AOL days who never really showed up here in a big way (Ranger Jeff comes to mind, based on the last time I prowled the ruins of SDMB-2).
I can look up the “aol URL” I still have stored in my “favorite places” but I have to boot in an older operating system to run AOL 3.0 in order to get to them.