| My first experience on the Internet was when I got to college in the fall of 1992. I had done lots of BBSing before that, and I treated the Internet the same way - a bunch of different tools to get the same sort of social experience. Email w/ pine. BBS message boards became Usenet w/ trn. Gopher. Finding random people with finger, and chatting with ytalk. Once talked with a random girl named Thuy in Perth, which blew my mind at the time. Some shlub in the US sending messages live to Australia. Downloading all sorts of freeware from wuarchive.wustl.edu. It felt smaller then, and something inviting (to me at least). You'd recognize email addresses from one corner popping into a new one, and it gave the whole Internet a sense of continuity. It was a place I wanted to interact with. Usenet, in particular, was usually a pretty good source of information. As a matter of course, people attached their email address to each posting. And they usually only had one - HoTMaiL and its ilk wouldn't come around until '96 or so. If you saw an email address you recognized, you'd have an idea of trustability. Today, I really don't contribute much. I don't surf r/new or whatever, so somebody else has usually said anything I want to say. C'est la vie. |