(That happens to go to a post of mine. I had the AOL URL to the board itself saved in “Favorite Places” but that was a different computer and an older OS, don’t have easy access to it right now)
That won’t work in a regular web browser, you needed to paste it into the blank that would come up when you did ⌘-K (“Keyword”).
I spend a weekend re-reading posts from '96 and '97 when I found out about it.
ETA (too late for editing window): There was also an “SDMB II” posting area, created very very late in the game after the main AOL SDMB board was theoretically condemned to the wrecking ball. As of '04, there were still a couple of old-timer AOL-SDMB folks who never followed the rest of us over here, posting at the rate of ~ 8 posts per week total. Ranger Jeff, possibly? HpstrDufuz? Don’t remember for sure who.
If the day arrives in the future and you need a Zip Drive, I have two external Parallel port 100 MB Zips. I would be happy to loan you one or both for the project. I use them about once a year at this point.
There was a brief television show for the Straight Dope.
For a while we could use html code on the board and it was fun for a while, but people soon made that impossible to allow. Pages full of animated gifs and other persons not getting the difference between, hosting graphics on their own site, verses graphics hosted on other peoples sites.
Cite a rule and it has a good reason for being in existence. They have implemented new rules only to curb blatant abuses.
My memory is certainly getting faulty. Was it early in '99 that we had the “Post Your Wallpaper!” thread that led immediately to the Can’t Post Images decision?
Seriously, there was The Straight Dope on A&E. For about 15 minutes.
It existed for a long time, must have been an overlooked server at AOL. For several years you could get to it directly even though we left AOL long ago. Then you could only get to it by entering an actual post number and navigating from there, as AHunter describes. Ther was a small group of posters that continued hanging out there, they couldn’t bear to leave and didn’t much want to come over here.
When AOL upgraded their software recently all that vanished; guess they finally cleared that server.
My memory of the Straight Dope on AOL was that when you searched through Cecil’s database, it searched both the message board, the archive of columns, and the chat sessions.
It rarely produced quality results.
Am I the only one that remembers that?
And yes, I regret waiting until 2000 to sign up for the “internet” message board.
Heh, what’s funny to me is how much of this I remember. I lurked on the AOL boards for a long time, making only a handfull of posts on my aol username of the time (Athair313; don’t ask, I was 13 years old when I made it). Then, we dropped the AOL account and I couldn’t use that anymore. Years later I found out they were setting up an MB on the internet. For some reason I thought my account would still be good, but it didn’t work, and I fell into the habit of putting off resolving it for a few years. Then one day I broke down and made my current account.
Considering how inactive I was back in the day, it always surprises me how much of the early SDMB history I remember, and how many of the long-lost posters I recognize. As for the archives of the old posts… On the one hand I’d love the chance to read old conversations, on the other hand I wonder if I’m not better off with the oft-times awkward early years of my internet activity lost to history
E Pluribus Gad! Is the Goatse image really that old? That guy probably has cave drawings and beer can pyramids in there by now. :eek:
I was around in the AOL days, but not at the very beginning, with the apes around the black monolith. (RIP Stanley Kubrick, souls resurrected on Wednesday, or whatever) Ouch. My brain hurts. :smack:
I used to quote Firesign Theater, saying, “I’ve been here since before the beginning,” but I guess it isn’t true. I’ll be 58 tomorrow, but some of you were dancing 'round the fire in the forest before I got there. I doff my old white straw Panama to you pioneers.
