| In the very early days we used BBS that we dialed or telnet'ed into. These were text systems where you chat and leave messages about you had found. If you search around you can find web interfaces that will let you telnet into some them.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system) After that there were USENET/Newsgroups. Its a universal discussion board. You can still get to it by using 'news reader' software package and finding an open server. You can also pay for access but unless you really need the need the history ::cough:: or special content it's not worth it. Otherwise use Google Groups which is both a USENET reader and it's forum system (https://groups.google.com/). Yahoo.com was the best directory at the time.(http://web.archive.org/web/19970124192912/http://www10.yahoo...) Back in the day there were few enough major websites that Yahoo had time to review and categorized sites by hand. As Yahoo became more of a search engine company and less of a director the Mozzill foundation created DMOZ.org. DMOZ was supposed to be the 'democratic' replacement for Yahoo. With the open nature of the internet bad player starting getting up voted and it became spammed horribly. Plus search engine were getting big. It never really took off. In between Yahoo being the dominate directory and Google trying to become the biggest search engine I like sites such as Webcrawler.com and Lycos.com. They're both still around. If I remember correctly Webcrawler still crawls site but it so back logged that its like 1-2 year behind. Lycos stopped doing it's crawls for a while was feed from Google search results. But it seems that Lycos started doing it's crawls again but with a really engine. Finally we used a real time text chat system called IRC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat). I loved using mIRC on Windows 3.1.(https://www.mirc.com/) It was simple and fast. But by modern standards it not very intuitive. Think of Discord where you can have unfiltered channels but with almost no filters. FYI: if you want to have some fun check out Microsoft Comic Chat. It worked on IRC as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat). That was abused so badly at the time. |