The question’s in the title – are there any historical institutions that might be considered similar to an internet message board, or did the idea spring into being fully formed the instant people got online?
I’m familiar, or course, with Usenet and email lists and the like. Those, however, share one important aspect of message boards: the requirement that users have a computer. So are there any other examples in history where multiple people communicated via text? And did this lead to internet message boards, or did the message board idea arise independently?
[sub]OK, first person to claim that, when they were a boy, they had to drive the wagon back and forth to town and post with index cards on a cork message board, and when they ran out of thumb tacks they had to use bits of fingernail trimmed to the quick, and those damn kids these days have it easy – that person gets the back of my hand.[/sub]
The Victorian Internet discusses the invention of the telegraph. I haven’t read the book but the author draws parallels between the relatively instantaneous communication of telegraphy and the internet.
Letter columns in daily newspapers used to be a big thing for expressing one’s opinion.
And we’ve been teasing JayJay in a Pit thread about his figuratively nailing 95 theses to a cathedral door, which if you think about it is a very early precursor to what we are doing.
At one time, people with the literacy, money, and time available would write literally dozens of letters a day, more than most but the obsessive post online today. And much longer letters as well. The complete correspondences of many famous people run into the tens of thousands.
These letters were not just one-to-one correspondence, pardon the pun. Often they were read and discussed with one’s peers. Just as likely, they were quoted and passed on in argument or discussion with others interested in the discussion. We know as much as we do about the beginnings of the U.S. because the founding fathers incessantly wrote one another arguing the issues.
You can find similar instances in the scientific community. Pierre Fermat, he of the theorem, was known as a hub, a server if you like, in a massive international network of mathematicians all talking about their latest discoveries, proofs, and notions.
When magazines started letter columns, the Frequent Posters, so to speak, exchanged talk amongst themselves in a continuing dialog. Science fiction fandom arose from these letter column exchanges.
Chess by mail networks were international long before computers.
People have been creating these networks for as long as people have been able to communicate over long distances. Computers took the leap to making the correspondence visible to all simultaneously. This was a huge leap, and we see the ongoing effects. But it’s quantitative and not qualitative.
In the sciences, there are letters journals, which is basically a bunch of physicists or whatever hammering things out via text in a different, less formal sort of way than peer-reviewed articles.
Mersenne is certainly a good example of a hub, but Fermat is known to have had a large and contentious correspondence as well. I’m sure many names could be added. What about Gauss?
I might add that I have read The Victorian Internet. Telegrams were never used in quite the same way as letters were, but the telegraph operators created a wide and chatty network among themselves.
17th century pamphleteering. Printing costs had dropped to the point where anybody with a relatively small amount of money and a message could hand out pamphlets. The result was something a lot more like the current blogosphere, rather than a message board, but it does provide an example of a terrific rise in unedited, unreviewed, often polemic or scurrilous prose enjoying greatly enhanced circulation do to technological advances.
There’s a particular type of science fiction fanzine called an “apa.” Apa is short for amateur press association. A fanzine is an amateur magazine (or maybe newsletter would be a better term) produced and mailed by a science fiction fan containing articles, reviews, letters, etc. more or less about science fiction. The printing of the magazine would be done by whatever the cheapest copying method of the time was. Fanzines would be financed by subscriptions or just by “you send me your fanzine and I’ll send you mine” agreements. One type of fanzine was the apa. It was, in effect, a set of letters from many fans. Each fan who was a subscriber to the apa would write a long letter with their reviews, comment, reactions to previous issues, etc. They would make enough copies for every other subscriber to have a copy. They would send the copies to the editor and enclose enough money to pay for mailing their copy. The editor would copy and collate all the letters and send a copy (with all the letters from each subscriber) to each subscriber. Alternately, the subscribers would send just one copy to the editor and send enough money for both copying and mailing.
These have a long history in science fiction fandom. There was a lot of crossover between science fiction fandom and the developers of the Internet. A lot of terminology crossed over. I find it unlikely that the creators of message boards didn’t know about apas.
How about, um, message boards? You know, those big slabs of cork where you could post a message using thumbtacks? The whole reason why the Internet version are called “boards”?
Walloon’s example of ham radio is really more analogous to IRC and other chat programs. It also carried over terminology, such as “channel” for a set of people all of whom could hear each other (though “chat room” seems to be more common nowadays).
Also, as a small correction, letters journals in the sciences are still peer-reviewed, but the level of peer-review is a little less intense, and the papers tend to be somewhat shorter and more straightforward. You wouldn’t publish anything controvertial in a letters journal (which if anything, makes them less like modern message boards).
In grade school we used to write on desks and/or bathroom walls. Somebody would start with a comment of some sort, and other people would fill in their comments below the previous “post”.
Notes & Queries was and is a magazine dedicated to intellectual questions on all topics. This magazine was started in the mid-1800’s and it is still going strong. The oldest editions are currently being proofed for up-loading to project guttenberg at the Distributed Proofreading site pgdp.net. I love this little journal. It contains all of the snarkiness of the internet, but with oh, so much better grammar.
How about the Salons? Which I guess is where the on-line magazine gets it’s name. Basically informal societies hosted by a rich patron to get together and discuss ideas. No off-line content, that I am aware of.
Question to Chronos: Just how similar might olde-tyme cork bulletin boards be to current message boards? I had the impression that thumbtack-style bulletin boards were exclusively for posting announcements ad such, as opposed to a continuing discussion, which seems to be a crucial distinction.
At a university library I used to go to, there was a ‘Comments and Suggestions’ book, where anyone could write a comment (and possibly have a reply from the librarian). Fairly straightforward idea, but it had turned into a general forum where people wrote all kinds of things, replied to each other, wrote bits of poetry or stories, argued, etc. It really was a message board, including using nicknames to sign your posts, flamewars, grammar snipes, and occasional real enlightenment. (I learned more about the Israeli-Arab conflict from reading two posts there than from all the articles and news reports I’ve read before or since).
In fact, my nickname here is inspired by the nick of the person who turned me on to the Comments and Suggestions book.
Also, notebook logs at camping shelters along the Appalachian Trail and similar places are kind of message-boardy, though most people only leave one message and move on, so there’s not much back-and-forth. But through-hikers often leave messages for each other, and can have a bit of running dialogue spread over a whole bunch of different notebooks as they move north (or less often south) along the trail.