Ars Technica, incidental to a back-end revamp, is boasting of the age of their fine forum.
"Community is vital to Ars Technica
"When longtime Ars readers talk about how long they’ve been around they often point to their forum registration date (mine is June 8, 2001). It can be a badge of pride!...."
Don't we have some similarly long-term members here?
"In an era where many sites are closing their comment sections, and social media increasingly treats people like a commodity, we’ve chosen to refocus on how we can amplify the great contributions readers make here. To do that, we needed an entirely new forum and commenting system, and we’ve found it in XenForo, a modern forum system with a familiar feel."
It's going to be all sweetness and light at Ars Technica. 😉
"Community is vital to Ars Technica
"When longtime Ars readers talk about how long they’ve been around they often point to their forum registration date (mine is June 8, 2001). It can be a badge of pride!...."
Don't we have some similarly long-term members here?
"In an era where many sites are closing their comment sections, and social media increasingly treats people like a commodity, we’ve chosen to refocus on how we can amplify the great contributions readers make here. To do that, we needed an entirely new forum and commenting system, and we’ve found it in XenForo, a modern forum system with a familiar feel."
It's going to be all sweetness and light at Ars Technica. 😉
Forums are a new-fangled thing that were not really popular before the WWW became useful (early 90's) or popular with Netscape, the first multi platform web browser. Some of us old timers would connect our 1200 baud modems to an Apple II clone, or TRS-80 as far back as the late 70's, or an 8088 based IBM PC clone in the mid 80's. One could also connect to like minded people discussing a particular topic from that UNIX box at school or work. How did we do that? We had a list of phone numbers that could be called via modem for a BBS, or Bulletin Board System. Some of these were primarily for file sharing using FTP, but some offered a crude forum system. There were also real forum style things called Usenet Groups, including rec.audio.highend and rec.audio.tubes. I frequented rec.audio.computermusic. I remember a BBS called the Cathouse that had lots of downloadable software and electronic schematics for various construction projects. As modem speeds improved these systems grew more sophisticated and popular.
I was on CompuServe well before commercial WWW.
CompuServe Forums are one of the archetypes. Dozens/hundreds of SIGs (Special Interest Groups), each dividable into 17 (later 23) Sections. Although all Teletype (at first), they had true branched threading which is very rare today. (True branching made it easier for sysops to prune thread drift into healthy new threads. Free money for CI$ and many wizops, some made a living.
On the other side there were the FidoNet and also the edu/mil newsgroups.
In Bay Area there was The Wall. I never saw that, but it too is a sturdy root. FWIW, another forum I visit has a section "The Wall" in memory.
Ward Christensen is credited with CBBS, a public dial-in BBS, but maybe mostly a software service? CBBS is tied-in with XMODEM, binary files over text links. Also a one-modem BBS without offline readers (yet) is pretty limited how much chatter can happen.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/when-bbs-sysops-ruled-the-earth/
Yes, I was on CS and usenet in the old text only days, and other bulletin boards... Like Tubelab says, a different dial in for each one. From late 70s onwards I was designing commercial modems, used to dial into worldwide systems at work for "testing".. Saved on my home phone bill!
After failing miserably at college in the early 70's, I decided to try again in 1989, but the expensive private school had junk for computers with poor networking. In 1992 I decided to get a masters degree at a state school where the engineering lab had a room full of well connected Sparc 2's. You had to be an engineering student to have an account so there were usually machines available, especially early in the morning. I worked in an off (Motorola) campus think tank at the time where each 2 person cube had a Sparc 10 whether we needed it or not. I did some outside consulting work for a consumer electronics company that was next door to Galacticomm, maker of the Major BBS, a multi line BBS system that ran in an IBM XT or clone. One of their guys had a three or four page list of BBS'es and phone numbers. Some of them were porting their BBS'es to internet connected FTP servers, so there was a list of .edu sites too. I guess I had better visibility to what was out there than the random explorer did.
This was during the time period when I did little audio DIY, and most of that was solid state, except for a few vacuum tube guitar amp builds. My internet explorations were usually related to DIY computer projects, computer based music, MIDI, ham radio and other related subjects.
This was during the time period when I did little audio DIY, and most of that was solid state, except for a few vacuum tube guitar amp builds. My internet explorations were usually related to DIY computer projects, computer based music, MIDI, ham radio and other related subjects.
Not this forum, but I’ve been a member since 13 Jan 2003. 20 years almost although I read the forums previously. Days when dial up was king..
Hover your name and peep or grab the URL under it. "...members/nisbeth.64/" I think you are #64 of ~542,965
{buglet: the Member List can't count that high. I went by "Newest Members" numbers.}
