The History of the Straight Dope Online

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve been on the board since 1998 and was thinking the other day about some of the older things on AOL Dope. I considered putting this in the “About the Message Board” part, but it’s really about all of SD Online.

I don’t know. I’m just reminicing(screw spelling) for soem reason. Anyone remember some of these things?

  1. I have always thought that it was good when the archive was categorized into subjects, like word-origins and history. I wonder why they didn’t do that when they moved to the 'net. Then again, the archive is larger here also.

  2. Remember when the search engine used to bring up more than just the archive? I think it used to show results from online chats and the msg. boards also. That was kinda annoying because you had to search through an entire chat to find anything useful.

  3. Remember the cool graphics used on AOl? Sure they took awhile to load the first few times, but it was cool. I remember the large brain with the machine parts, but what was it before? I’ve forgotten.

  4. I rembember when the SD moved from AOL to the 'net. For some reason, I thought that was the end of it. Man, was I wrong. I’m really glad it’s on the web now. It is quite a bit better since it allows such a large group of diversity.

Well, that’s all I was thinking about for now. I thought this might be interesting to some people, but if not I guess it will disappear.

Anyone remember anything else interesting?

2

I remember when SDMB was on AOL and I wasn’t and whenever there would be a reference to it in one of the books would feel sooo jealous.

And I have punished you all with my run-on sentence. ha.

3

One time, I stumbled on the archives for Usenet newsgroup creation control messages. Find the control message (cmsg newgroup) .fan.cecil-adams, and you’ll have found what is likely evidence of the earliest permanent presence of the Straight Dope on the Internet.

(elmwood searches for a little while …)

Okay, got it!


From jym@remarque.berkeley.edu Thu Feb 10 21:42:00 1994
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For your newsgroups file: The omniscient columnist.

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