1998 MovieNotes board (now defunct) to get opinions on newly released movies.
This one. Offices of BT in London. 1999. Tracking down Cecil Adams, author of books I owned. Followed “Threadspotting” link. Thought, “What’s this, then?” Lurked, travelled the world, ended up in another boring job, this time in Toronto. Registered.
It was probably this one. But I frequented newsgroups for years beforehand. (The first one was pronably alt.fan.britney-spears.) And chat rooms years before that.
This’ll date me.
QuantumLink.
Prior to that, various local BBSs.
This one in summer of 2000. Just on a whim, I googled Straight Dope, since I’d been a fan of the column for some time. It took me a little while to figure out how it all worked. I’ve been hooked ever since.
www.one-percent.com. It’s a Janes Addiction fansite, found it through my ex. It is still there, but the mod took down the boreds a few years ago in a rather dramatic way. There were some good people there, some of whom I am still in contact with.
1995 or '96. Usenet. rec.gambling.poker
Haj
1991, Usenet, proooobaby rec.sport.baseball. I’d say almost definitely. The Star Trek group would have come a bit later, as would soc.history. Posted what-if queries (and got one or two good responses back) before they even split into alt.history.what-if and now soc.history.what-if. Alternate history and Star Trek were study break-type hobbies of mine.
As for website message boards, probably not till '97, those weren’t too big before then. Then…hmmm, not sure. Of course, AOL had local boards that got taken down when the service got too big & they got too cumbersome.
Local BBS’s using Fidonet. I also started on GEnie’s SFRT about the same time in 1989.
'92, a confer based bulletin board on my college’s VAX/VMS system. 4 years of that, then nothing major until this one.
The Garden Web forums, probably sometime in 1998.
I found the Straight Dope site in early 1999, but never came to the MB until later.
Speaking of dating one’s self, I’ve got one word:
TYMNET
Beyond that, how about BRS After Dark and GEnie? Or CompuServe charging something like $4.95 per hour for 300 baud and $12.95 for 1200?
I’ve been doing BBS and message boards since around 1985.
Kids today have it so easy and cheap. I get a full month of all-I-can-use 1.3 megabit DSL per month now for less than what three hours of 1200 baud service cost back then. Now, just try finding anything where you can dial in with something so slow!
For me, before there was a web on the internet there were moderated email digests and there was America Online and there was CompuServe. (I never really did usenet until much later). So my oldest presence on the internet would be archives of the Women’s Studies list WMST-L circa 1991.
On CompuServe, there was an area called “ZiffNet” (a Ziff-Davis thing) which had Mac-specific boards of sorts along with lots of shareware (Ziffnet was one of the three main repositories, the others being the Info-Mac archive and the Umich archive).
There were lots of local BBS dialups too, I remember posting comments and getting into discussions on those things, plain text over a 2400 baud modem.
On America Online I was a participant in several of the posting sub-areas loosely called “The Exchange” – there was a men’s board and a women’s board doing gender stuff, and there was a board similar in many respects to our own MPSIMS called “Periwinkles”.
And then one day AOL highlighted the Straight Dope on their main page and I checked it out just from curiosity.
AOL switched to a flat-rate plan and quickly decided that since they weren’t making more money for every minute they kept us online they might as well ruin all the content areas, so both The Exchange and the Straight Dope were nuked and AOL members scattered to the “real internet” in droves.
This board, and my timing couldn’t have been worse. I found the board after my interest was piqued by the old A&E show, and the showcased thread that day was announcing that Wally had died. I read that thread crying, even though I never knew him.
If only I had found this place a few weeks/months earlier. “Wally tries phone sex” was the funniest thing I have ever read.
I started out with rec.sports.boomerang or alt.something.boomerangs around '93 but it was overrun with spam so everyone migrated to a listserv called rang-list ('96ish). For convenience they subesequently started a yahoo group called boomerangtalk. Neat bunch of guys, but similar to any rabid little interest subculture - some of them can’t understand why EVERYBODY doesn’t love boomerangs. If only the world could see how cool boomerangs are . . . that sort of thing.
Why did I join? Because I can’t understand why everybody doesn’t love boomerangs. If only the world could see how cool boomerangs are . . .
Oh my ghod… has it been 20 years already? Am I that much of a grizzled veteran already?
My first message board was a 300 baud BBS in like 1984 or something… I don’t remember exactly, I just remember my boss showing me a printout of dirty jokes, and I asked where he got them. He showed me how to use the acoustic-coupled modem to dial into this other computer that had message areas devoted to off-color jokes.
After that, it was usenet, then Macintosh BBSes, FirstClass BBSes, AOL (briefly) and then web-based message forums.
I can’t recall my first web-based forum. It might have been Slashdot (I’m user no. 10093 – missed out on a 4 digit ID by a matter of days). Or maybe PowerWatch, a site for owners of PowerComputing Macintosh Clones.
SDMB was the first, probably sometime ~ 2000. I found Straight Dope from the TV show years ago, and the website afterward when I first had internet access in 1997. I didn’t click on the “message boards” link for a long time 'cause I didn’t know what it was, and was plenty busy reading all the old columns and what-not. This board has pointed me to a couple of the boards, but I only post here and I don’t read much of the other ones. I don’t know why, mostly 'cause I resist change? I don’t feel the need to go anywhere else?
My very first was the local BBS in 1990, on a 1200 baud modem. It was supposed to be a gay BBS, but since it was the only one in town, it had all types. Well, as long as ‘all types’ refers to a whole lot of desperately geeky guys awkwardly chasing after a few equally geeky girls, and incidentally some gay geeks too.
After that, in the early '90s, it was a couple of newsgroups–I remember going through this list of thousands of groups to find a few to subscribe to, and being too naive to realize that spanking.alt was not, in fact, about parenting issues.
I got here in '99, having been a long-time Dope reader, and lurked for months before I got around to registering. It was my first www-based message board.
Friend of mine found SD through bored.com and I followed.
Same here! I still remember the first BBS I visited, the Bowling Alley. I found it in the Yellow Pages! T’was an IBM board but also had files for pretty much every home OS at the time ('86). And a list of all the other BBSs in the area.