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by tialaramex 1275 days ago
Severals groups of boys at my grammar school† built what were called "User groups" which were "online" services accessible only on the school's computers with (at least theoretically) exclusive membership. There'd be maybe some simple games for your users, perhaps some sort of "bulletin board" and most often a "chat" service. Except, on the PCs we were increasingly using, these chat services all worked by using file I/O to a shared file, which is obviously very hard on the poor file server in ~1991 which is when this would have been happening. So the "chat services" were banned by staff. But I figured out how to write NetBIOS/NetBEUI software so I could implement chat without touching files, and this was allowed, increasing popularity of my User group, which I believe was named "Erewhon 2280".

† for Americans, the UK used to have selective education, some parts of the country still do, under this system children who test well at age 11 or 12 are sent to different state funded schools from their peers, mostly single sex such as a Grammar School, so that's a school of mostly high achieving all boys, this is probably a bad idea on net but it's popular for various reasons.