Responding in the dead Dayton thread earlier today started me thinking. I joined TrekBBS in 1999. Then joined Wordforge after it split off from TrekBBS. TrekBBS wasn't the first BBS I had joined or used. I actually joined a BBS further back in 1989, shortly after Star Trek V came out. I remember having some discussions on there, in particular on why would Starfleet let a ship with as many problems as the Enterprise A was having and how the relationship between Uhura and Scotty was sudden and out of the blue. That was way back when the "Internet" consisted of BBS's, Usenet, FTP services. And we used Prodigy as well. I do remember looking up and finding software and games on the FTP services. Interestingly BBS's haven't changed that much. Even back then you had trolls, flame wars and so on. Well anyway, that's more or less how I'm on here 37 years later. What eventually brought you here?
I found TBBS in 2001, but I have no idea what led me there. Probably a Google search for something. TBBS also wasn't the first message board where I posted, but the others were work-related to some extent and all but one are now gone. That last one gets so little traffic it makes WF look like a Walmart on Black Friday.
I floated in around 200-2001 looking for ENT news. The TrekBBS forums updated faster than the news section of TrekToday.
I started exploring 'social media' on Usenet in... the mid to late 1990s? Later I added an occasional bit of IRC and a happy stint on WebTV/MSNTV. When discussion boards (now known as "forums") appeared and matured to the point they were more or less stable and gaining popularity I pretty much used them exclusively. I had and still have Facebook and Xwitter accounts but don't use them much these days and even less back then. As for how I ended up here that's easy: A poaster going by "Jack" mentioned the place in another forum and kindly shared the URL. A few clicks later here I am.
IIRC: somehow someway I found TrekBBS. I'm not sure what my handle there was because I didn't post much. I then ran into the woman who became my (second) wife. She posted on SlipstreamBBS, later ExIsle and then Troll Kingdom as TrancesHuggyPillow, later THP, later Blondie. When we started dating, she turned me on to TK which I found to be a hilarious place to be goofy in. Somehow someway I wound up over here to post some. I think she and I also did some other boards like LONAF and TerranBBS, and I went to Brawl Hall some. Most are gone, TrekBBS is an echo chamber and TK is deader than disco. Jen stopped hanging on these boards, but I still hang around.
I found TBBS looking for information on Nemesis and Attack of the Clones. I lurked for years then joined in 2006 I think. Got banned and someone mentioned this place so I came here.
I joined TrekBBS in 2001, and then again in 2002 after the board crash. When things were getting prickly in 2004, I joined Wordforge as a backup nerd account should I end up leaving TrekBBS. Once I was kicked out of TrekBBS, this place has become my primary home on the internet, though it doesn't go as in-depth on Star Trek as TBBS did I'm still surrounded by you nerds, and I'm glad to be here. Anyway, before TrekBBS it was just Star Trek sites, mostly little web pages hosted by Geocities and Tripod and the like, and before that it was a few BBSes that I'd dial into to get my Star Trek fix, and before all of that it was a local Star Trek fan club which produced a newsletter on plain copy paper, typed out, with the latest rumors (they're going to get Geneviève Bujold for the new Star Trek series, guys!) and short stories.
I was googling Trek humor when I found TBBS by way of Zeke's five minutes Voyager content that was posted at Trek Nation. I followed Stewey here after he was banned and ended up quite literally growing up with this place.
I found TrekBBS while looking for information about Enterprise, signed up — I assume sometime in 2001, because I'm almost certain it was before Enterprise premiered, but it also wasn't that long before — then lost that account, probably in a database crash because I think TBBS did have a couple of those early on. Oddly, my current account there dates to May 17, 2003, and my WF account, which was also a second registration due to a crash, has a date only 10 months later. I thought I had been around TBBS for a while before the WF spinoff, but it looks like my pre-WF TrekBBS time was actually really short. I may still have an export of the "Is it time for TNZ to secede from TrekBBS?" thread saved on a hard drive somewhere.
1989? Were you attending a university? Or working for some government funded research? I know War Games came out in early 80s, but even in 89, it was still not widely available and mostly used for delivering data. It was later released for “entertainment”.
Sort of, I was taking some classes while in high school. Through that I found some BBS's. There were very few. Text only, some of those had file transfer capability.
I was, peripherally, involved in a project in 90/91 and I was on the reviving end of setting up a connection. Which was why I wondered. I still have a printout with the original address of a story in which Picard’s enterprise encounters Adama’s battlestar Galactica. But never got on any bbs’s at the time. I was younger then and more interested in doing physical things and less interested in looking at a computer monitor and/or reading anything. That was a period in my life when I didn’t watch tv or read many books.
I was able to keep access to the Usenet, FTP servers for years after. The log in credentials gave me access to several universities. It was a few years later that dial in BBS's started to become available. There were two or three that didn't require long distance dialing. They also had very early versions of chat functions. So, yeah. I've essentially had an online persona/presence going on for 37 years. I stayed active physically then. I'd go online later at night, dial up kind of forced that.
My first newsreader was WinVN, developed at least in part by folks associated with NASA if I recall correctly. Ah... the good ol' days. <wipes a maudlin tear>
