[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[Bob Purvy]

thanks, all. My character, Len, will have just retired from Chrysler
recently, as a financial analyst. He was fascinated by VisiCalc & the Apple
II; in fact, he's the one who told his daughter Janet about it, and she was
working on the Xerox Star! But I don't think he'd be very Internet-savvy,
at first.

I kinda think it'd be fun to have him be a clueless AOL user at first, and
then slowly grow in sophistication. I recall that the "walled garden" idea
was pretty attractive to AOL & others at first -- "the Internet is a scary
place! We bring you the best of it in a safe way!" as silly as that sounds
now.

On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 6:14 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> IIRC, I had a Compuserve account, although I can't remember exactly
> when.  But I think I remember that Compuserve's charges were based on
> hours of connect time.   So there was financial pressure on Users to
> dial up, do what you wanted to do, and hang up as quickly as possible.
> That's very different from today's always-connected world.   I thought
> that might matter for your novel.  Good writing!
> Jack
>
>
> On 8/31/22 16:42, Bob Purvy via Internet-history wrote:
> > I should have mentioned that Usenet and mailing lists were kinda techie
> > back then. I'm thinking my guy would have started with CompuServe,
> Prodigy,
> > AOL... something less intimidating for a noobie guy.
> >
> > On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 4:30 PM Jorge Amodio <jmamodio at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Usenet news was extremely active during those days, you may find some
> >> archives.
> >>
> >> IRC was very popular and cucme, I met my wife on IRC during 1995 ;-), we
> >> had some interesting opers wars to take control of channels.
> >>
> >> Cheers
> >> -Jorge
> >>
> >>> On Aug 31, 2022, at 5:53 PM, Bob Purvy via Internet-history <
> >> internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >>> Something you wouldn't think would be a problem:
> >>>
> >>> I'm planning out my next novel, and I want to have a character haunting
> >> the
> >>> chat rooms and forums on investing, around 1995 and on. I don't want to
> >>> quote anything or dox anyone -- I just want to get the tone and format
> >> back
> >>> then, as well as the topics they were talking about.
> >>>
> >>> The Wayback Machine seems to have started at the end of 1996. Does
> anyone
> >>> have links to earlier archives?
> >>> --
> >>> Internet-history mailing list
> >>> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> >>> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
> --
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