[ih] Love affairs on the very first virtual communities ?

[Dave Crocker]

On 8/30/2013 1:39 PM, Vincent Glad wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> I'm a french journalist for Les Inrockuptibles (a cultural magazine).
>
> I'm working on a paper about the story of the "online flirt", and
> especially about the period before the web.
>
> My investigation begins in wondering if there already were love affairs,
> on the very first virtual communities before our french Minitel (such as
> the Community Memory, Usenet, BBS or even, why not, the Arpanet)



One of the earliest was Carl Sunshine and his girlfriend-then-wife 
(Tova?).  He graduated from UCLA around 1972 and went off to Stanford 
graduate school.

I was doing various support stuff at the UCLA Arpanet project and was 
told to give Tova access to the terminal room so they could instant 
message each other.  (The actual facility was terminal-to-terminal, 
character-at-a-time "link"ing, as I recall via the Tenex operating 
system from BBN.)  they used this regularly; long distance telephone 
calls were /very/ expensive in those days.


d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net