I was a late-80s Usenet user, came on just after the great renaming, and at the start our feed was from overnighted tapes from the NASA downlink on our continent. I felt like I’d been included in a global civilisation that almost nobody in my provincial city between the desert and the sea knew about. I was an immediate convert and told everybody that the future was coming.
In 1990/1 I organised the proposal for voting the creation of a comp.os subgroup while backpacking around Europe for 4 months. I still remember the kindness of the Charles University people who not only provided a terminal but also a warm meal (I must have looked fairly hungry!)
By the late 90s, the buzz and bustle of Usenet was turning down and the great people were hanging out elsewhere.
By the early 2000’s - apart from some weird community recolonisations of alt.poetry or something, it felt like a vast ruined landscape, and wasn’t appealing to spend time there.
Such a big chunk of my life, commingled with something similar but smaller on a fairly isolated cluster of PLATO systems.
In 1990/1 I organised the proposal for voting the creation of a comp.os subgroup while backpacking around Europe for 4 months. I still remember the kindness of the Charles University people who not only provided a terminal but also a warm meal (I must have looked fairly hungry!)
By the late 90s, the buzz and bustle of Usenet was turning down and the great people were hanging out elsewhere.
By the early 2000’s - apart from some weird community recolonisations of alt.poetry or something, it felt like a vast ruined landscape, and wasn’t appealing to spend time there.
Such a big chunk of my life, commingled with something similar but smaller on a fairly isolated cluster of PLATO systems.