Terms such as thread, post, troll, sock etc. seem to be used on a variety of messageboards. Have the origins of their use in this context been traced?
Here is one suggestion for troll. I’m sure you could go from there.
tldr
Here is an excellent article about the very first board, PLATO Notes. I can testify to its correctness, having been a PLATO author beginning in the spring of 1974 and continuing until I left Illinois in 1977. I was a heavy user of Notes, big Empire player, and had the Star Trek column in the mentioned PLATO newspaper.
I’m pretty sure we used post, but not thread, since the what we’d now call threads were separated - kind of like they are here, but not on Usenet. There the threading concept was used to follow a discussion amongst a bunch of posts made sequentially on various topics in one newsgroup.
Here is a USENET post from Oct 1981 which references the PLATO system and also uses the words “thread” and “flaming” in their familiar context. So those terms definitely predate USENET.
Flaming (and hacking) were used in non-computer contexts at MIT, at least, in the very early '70s. I can see that Rob was feeling his way into this concept. Real threaded newsreaders were a bit after this, IIRC.
You can see how PLATO directly influenced netnews. I got my first netnews distribution directly from Illinois in about 1985 - via a new PhD we had hired from there. I put it on our 3B20 (a Vax-like supermini) and I used it internally to our Lab. I never got around to hooking it to the net, however. A pity - I missed a few opportunities to get in early. Could have been a zillionaire if I did.
Notice the old style mail addressing in the link.
Thanks for the info folks. I’ve been studying the history of computers from a hardware point of view but it’s fascinating to see where conventions of placing data on the net came from.