[ih] Chat room and forum archives

[Dr Eberhard W Lisse]

A bit of a time line to put things into perspective.

I logged in to Randy Bush's machine via X25 in early 1990, and did email
there, using of course Kermit-MS. Don't remember what system it was
(perhaps Xenix, but he reads here :-)-O)

	First with an acoustic coupler at 300 bps and later with a
	1200/2400 dial up modem.  Technically illegal, most likely because
	the Apartheid authorities could not listen in (I kid you not :-)-O),
	but nobody really bothered any more in the run-up to and after
	Independence.

	X25 was horribly expensive (in Namibia) and Randy fortunately
	pointed us towards Rhodes University in South Africa via the phone,
	which was less expensive but still quite a bit.

I then switched to UUPC during 1990 on MS-DOS and I found a page
still giving a little insight:

	https://www.uupc.net/history.shtml

	A friend of mine in Germany wrote something he called MicroElm,
	which like its big brother allowed to read and write emails in a
	screen oriented manner.

	I wrote a 2000 (!)  line BAT (!)  script to tie the two together and
	that worked like nobody's business, even my mother could use it (and
	did actually).

	I do not recall whether this allowed Usenet News, but if asked I
	would tend to say it didn't.  However there were many interesting
	mailing lists.

I added my system to the UUCP "maps" which allowed all the big UUCP
hosts to know how to "route".

	I do not remember whether there was an MTA (SMAIL?) on MS-DOS, but
	since I had only one single connection the default "route" would
	always push the outgoing mail to Rhodes which initially used a FIDO
	connection to Randy Bush, then I think UUCP and eventually a leased
	line with some form of TCP/IP and software based "routers"

I then switched in 1991 to either Xenix or another Unix available for
the 386 at that time, don't remember which.

	I experimented a little with Minix but it was not ready for prime
	time, and most certainly read Usenet news (using nn) as I recall
	reading Linus Thorvald's famous post in the minix group.

I started using Linux at least 1993 but perhaps as early as 1992, first
with the stock uucp but then Taylor/uucp which was VERY effective.  I
subscribed to a small number of Usenet newsgroups, which Rhodes
University then pushed onto their outgoung uucp queue.

I think I also used nn for Usenet News but most certainly elm for mail.

	I found a small MTA (smail) which allowed me to use proper domain
	names (pushing everything over the one link out), .NA having been
	registered in May 1991, eventually I figured out how to gzip and
	batch the emails, squeezing a lot of efficiency out of this, cutting
	phone costs.  I played with sendmail later (you could configure this
	in 9 lines M4) and eventually of course moved to Postfix, so when
	the transition happened to TCP/IP email addressing did not need to
	change.

	I occasionally traveled to day-job conferences internationally and
	remember spending a whole day in a computer lab at Brown University
	pulling stuff with FTP (onto "stiffy" disks).

So for the protagonist in the US in 95 retiring from a technology
company (maybe involved with defense contracts) even as Financial
Analyst the better angle in my opinion could be having been on the ARPA
net, having read mail, lists and news in particular the below mentioned
investment groups at least initially.

Linux with X11 would have been available in several "distributions" by
then (at least SLS (1992, a bit buggy), Yggdrasil (1992/3 horribly
buggy), and Slackware (1993, used it for years))

Kermit would have been an option (on CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple and Unix/Linux)
to log into your friendly neighboring UUCP host and/or (eventually) onto
AOL/CompuServe and the like once they started to have content.

But on the other hand, if an OBGYN in (not so) deep Africa can do it...

el

On 2022-09-02 07:01 , Greg Skinner via Internet-history wrote:
> On Aug 31, 2022, at 4:28 PM, Leo Vegoda <leo at vegoda.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Aug 31, 2022 at 4:08 PM Ole Jacobsen via Internet-history
>> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't know about "chat rooms" exactly, but mailing lists have been
>>> around since the ARPANET days, wine-lovers, sf-lovers, etc, not to
>>> mention Usenet news groups.  On ANY topic?.
>>
>> Also look for usenet archives of discussion in alt.invest
>>
>> Kind regards,
>>
>> Leo
> 
> There was a misc.invest newsgroup with several subgroups also.  The
> earliest message I found from it on Google Groups is from 1986.
> 
> Incidentally, a misc.invest thread I found from 1987
> <https://groups.google.com/g/misc.invest/c/rZiC3GIPQPs/m/hynzWGihvg0J>
> contains a post from John B. Nagle.  I don’t know offhand if it is the
> same John B. Nagle of RFC896 and RFC970.
> 
> —gregbo

-- 
Dr. Eberhard W. Lisse   \         /       Obstetrician & Gynaecologist
el at lisse.NA             / *      |  Telephone: +264 81 124 6733 (cell)
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10007, Namibia           ;____/  Sect 20 of Act No 4 of 2019 may apply