1990 - Chat Line (It was a local, now defunct board where I live.) I actually met one of my best friends through it. The friend of a friend paid for the service and you could get a month free trial membership which I took advantage of on a whim.
After that I took a sabatical until I started here. I had a question that I e-mail Cecil and was refered to the board (I don’t remember what the question was.)
Wow, I wondered after I posted if anyone dated fromt he middle 1980s. I googled once the earliest posts - weird to see stuff from 1981! I was in like 6th grade, the earliest they have, and I thought computers were so Star-Trekkish.
A band’s (which will remain nameless for I am deeply ashamed I ever liked them) message board. I joined in '99 and it was the best board ever, but it slowly went downhill and met it’s end in '01.
Used to lurk about alt.fan.prachett and the Utopia boards.
Like cowgirl, I found the boards by following a Threadspotting link. I still remember the thread – it was the one where Satan talked about his girlfriend at the time wanting to fuck him in the ass with a strap-on dildo. It was a hilarious thread, and I immediately knew this would be a good place to hang out.
This one. I’d played around with some of the old MUDs in the early 90s at a friend’s place, but never had much interest.
And I am somewhat abashed to admit that to this day, even though I actually earn my living working for a Web site, I am totally unable to figure out how to view a “newsgroup.” I’ve never seen one.
Really? Pre-web, the telephone company (SW Bell here) tried us out on a version of the French electronic directory system. I can’t recall its name, although I want to say it was something like Nextel (isn’t that a current telcom?).
It was a text message monitor, with keyboard, that ran on your phone line. I was as intrigued by its mass communication potential as I had been by the boom in CB radio many years before. And the result was the same: very low signal to noise ratio. Lots of drunk 17 year olds signing on as SYSOP69, etc.
It was more like chat, a venue with which I’ve about 15 minutes of experience - as it doesn’t fit me very well - and I abandoned it within a year. That would have been about 1988 or 1989.
On the WWWeb, I had only spent some serious time at Hardware Central’s board before I came here, and subsequently abandoned them. I’m registered at some other boards, including our outliers, but I rarely attend anywhere else.
First ever?
Back in college ('91-95), I got involved fairly heavily with a couple of BBS systems - under a name that I can’t even remember now. I just know it wasn’t Lsura because the comments that led to this name hadn’t been made yet.
Junior year I got a computer and signed up with AOL, and used their message board things for a while. Then I went for several years without internet access, and once I got back online I found several boards that I liked, but the main ones were the Auelboard and the Left Behind message boards (those led me here, and I ditched those completely).
comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic or
alt.tasteless or
alt.drunken.bastards or
rec.games.muds.diku
This board? No idea.
Still just lurk for the most part.
alt.tasteless gave me the best .sig line ever.
“If it were not for physics and law enforcement,
I’d be unstoppable.”
Good stuff.
First message board was a Lois and Clark fanfic site five or six years ago, then a post on that site led me to snopes, then a post on *that * site led me here. Now this is my primary place to go when I’m on the net.
It was probably U.S. Videotel, which I was also on. I enjoyed many of its areas, including several message board areas and a RPG area.
Before that, I was on QuantumLink, as someone else noted above, though I was mostly doing chat then, and only a very little message board involvement. QLink was pay-per-minute for premium stuff like chat and email. I don’t want to think about how much money I wasted on that service. I learned my lesson, though…I only signed up for Videotel because it was flat-rate, and when it went to metered rate, I turned in my little box set. The set was a monitor with a keyboard that folded into the monitor, and a short phone line. It was something like WebTV is now, I imagine. It was a lot of fun while it lasted.
Now I have broadband and I’m VERY happy with it.
This board, 1-1-01 early hours of the a.m.
I had looked through the archives for a few weeks after googling something about the song American Pie. I eventually stumbled onto the boards.
This is my second post to this message board. but this is the first time I have ever registered to a message board. Hoping to figure out how it works. Any hints and help would be appreciated.
I had just got on-line 9/10/01.
One of the first things I did on the internet was type in keyword: marajuana and of all places it brought me to straightdope. Been here ever since.
Straight Dope reader since 1985. (Friend showed me Cecil’s 1st book). Got curious about a year ago and just typed www.straightdope.com in the url window to see what would happen. Lurked for a year and registered yesterday.
Pullin
October, 1982. I was introduced by a school friend (whose father is presently the mayor of Las Vegas) to a local BBS in Las Vegas, NV, a 300-baud Commodore-based homegrown system by the name of “Art’s War Room”. Sysop’s name was Art Bell. Yes, that Art Bell. Message board content was similar to present-day Usenet’s alt.flame newsgroup.
I had a Timex/Sinclair 1000, a TI 99/4A, and a Commodore Vic-20 with Vicmodem. I soon got a C64 with an actual floppy disk drive and a “Westridge” modem (it could dial the phone! …unlike the Vicmodem).
By late 1983 I’d written my own BBS, an endeavor which was online all of six weeks. Don’t know if I even had six callers.
Computers, BBS’s, and modem communications led to my programming career.
Art’s War Room survived until sometime in 1986, IIRC.
The original French system is Minitel
Got you all beat. My first was pad on the Plato system, when I was at the University of Illinois in 1974. Quoting posts was a new thing for pad.
Plato also had term talk, basically a one line instant message, lessons anyone could look at much like web pages, and interactive multiplayer games and MUDs. Practically everything on the internet, except spam, was on Plato first.
I first used usenet within Bell Labs around '84, with a tape of the distribution from the U of I. I remember when alt.sex was a single group, low volume!
Who here had an email address before domain addressing? Who here had a business card with it on it? Mine was {decvax, ucbvax,ihnp4}!erc3ba!sd
Long ago, when this board was on AOL, there was a link on Aol’s welcome screen. When the SDMB came here, I followed. I have tried some other mb’s, but I got tired of wading kneedeep through spam and bitter venomous flaming.