This one was the first, and really the only one I participate in. I go through periods of not participating at all, but I’ve never found a board I like better.
1997 - a bulletin board for women who were pregnant and due in July of 1998. I think it was called “Parent’s Place” or something like that. We moved from different hosting sites over the years and now we have a Facebook group.
We are still very active, having been friends for nearly 21 years. We started marking the 20th birthdays of those July 98 babies this past May (a preemie) and will end tomorrow with my son (12 days late).
The first was a forum for trainers in a particular field that I belonged to (and it was a good one too!, helpful, humorous professionals, great camaraderie across the globe – unfortunately it died out when they changed platform), but SDMB was the first I got involved in as a “civilian”.
calahan’s bar and grill, a channel on irc, for the life of me, I can’t think of which server now, it was so long ago.
PLATO here too, at University of Illinois in 1974. As you say, that was before the Internet, but like a little microcosm of things to come. We even had arguments about creationism.
Various CompuServe chats.
Aye; on the actual internet it was a recording artists/songwriters/DJs collective that a bunch of us formed called Spastikwax; this was back in late 2000. After that it was my Delta Force Land Warrior squad, Team Six; I used to have a lot of fun with those guys and stayed in touch with a few of them for more than a decade after I stopped playing DFLW. Then EQ came along…
But back in the 1980s I was active in a number of groups, although I escaped the notoriety that some of my friends achieved. For legal stuff, prolly the first place I hung around and made friends with anyone was the old Mines Of Moria BBS that Richard Garriott used to run out of his closet; this would have been like 1982 or 1983. There were a bunch of others too, some run by RL friends, but the one that sticks out for me is MOM because Richard went on to so many other things. Plus he was cool, ran a good BBS and there were other cool folks there too.
I got online in1997 and quickly found my way to a couple of guitar message boards. Was at one off and on for many years.
Right here, the SDMB.
I was in a couple of religion and science discussion forums on AOL from around 96 and always visited the AOL Straight Dope forum but rarely said much.
alt.rec. something Guns, maybe, or survivalism. That was early in 1995. The first web-based community I remember participating in was Bianca’s Smut Shack. That was mid-1995-ish. I had pharted around a bit previously with bulletin boards but these were the communities in which I first became an active and regular participant.
1990~ on various USENET newsgroups. I maintained a mailing list related to Major League Baseball on rec.sport.baseball
If you read the Red Sweater’s newspaper, I was the one with the Star Trek Preview column there. I suspect it was the first ever bit of Star Trek online writing in a continuing format.
Hm, I don’t recall the Red Sweater’s newspaper, but I no longer have all the brain cells I had back then.
Do you remember the PLATO Hotline in the Illini Union? I wrote that.
I started with Usenet groups like alt.fan.conan-obrien, alt.folklore.urban, rec.games.pinball and rec.games.frp.dnd.
rec.arts.SF-lovers in 1986. It’s since been renamed, of course. The SF stood for science fiction, not San Francisco, although we did get the occasional ISO posting from someone in the Bay area.
I got onto Prodigy when it first went online, and soon discovered the joys of unmoderated message boards. They had some cool discussions; for example, it introduced me to MST3K - the acronym didn’t make sense at first. I soon I discovered that you shouldn’t use a username like “PinkTurtle” unless you want a lot of strange messages assuming you’re a teenage girl; I was neither.
But before that the best forums were the internal IBM message boards. They were supposed to be business related, but since it was on the new fangled internet, everything was business related! They were pretty lenient at the time, and the discussions ranged from working with internal tools (PROFS! PE2!) to company travel to IBM PC games. It eventually led me here. Damned if I can remember what it was called.
Without question, the HBD.
A free internet beer for anyone who catches the reference.
I googled it and couldn’t find a reference in the first three pages.
That’s sad, really. It was a good thing.
The first group I was a part of was a fantasy football based group - I’m thinking it was usenet and not AOL because not every one in our league at the time used AOL (I did). I remember someone in our league found it and we all joined up (or showed up, I don’t remember actually ‘joining’ anything), it was good to talk to others in other leagues, the members helped disputes in other leagues, a lot of trash talk and a lot of lists in the days before fantasy football was a multimillion dollar business…little did we know…would have been late 80’s, definitely back in Baltimore, at the time, the only computer I has access to was my work desktop…
A BBS for English speakers (mostly Americans) in Japan in the late 90s.
Not really relevant, but about that time period, my friend discovered somewhere in America that he could dial into and have sex chats. He would do it now and then until one month he racked up several thousand dollars in long distance charges.