The past remembered

[pecunium]

james_nicoll pointed to someone else asking people to go to Google.groups and search for their earliest usenet posting.

Mine, so far as Google can find, is in 1998.

But in the searching I got to look at some of the history caught in the web. For those (and I don't know how many that is) who came to the net later, the world before blogging was rich. I started online sometime in, '89, or so, with BBSs. It's where I got to know skeetermonkey.

Many of those conversations were ephemeral. I did well on BBSs (even though my typing was worse than it is now, and my statements no less dense) because the form of them; simultaneous conversations, were much as the forms of my real life interactions with people (three conversations in a crowded newsroom, while one was working on a layout, or pasting-up a dummy: converstation across four tables at two in the morning on Sunday of a convention; where the waitress had just made everyone stand up because the table hadn't been bussed in six hours, and there were the remains of several dinners belonging to people who had paid and left, etc.. Maia is still, after eight years, amazed that I can keep track of what was being talked about when her family goes off the rails and starts to talk about something else, but I digress).

But usenet wasn't parallel, it was serial. One posted something, and it was complete.

Today I read a lot of old usenet. Some of it was good (there was a rant on UMA where I ripped into a moron who was saying any "leg" who had the gall to obey AR 670-1 better be larger, or lower ranking than he, or said asshat would beat the shit out of him).

Those were good times, in a way different from the good times of today.

It's where I "met" soldiergrrrl, and gridlore and pnh and tnh and a whole lot of people I know now, and didn't realise I knew then (like kate_schaeffer).

Hell, the present Open Thread (91) on Making Light has a theme, which was presaged on a rassff thread, back in 1999.

The wheel goes round and round. While one can't step twice in the same river, the from the banks it looks much the same, and that's a comfortable thing.