[ih] 40 years ago net.motss was newgroup'd

[John Levine]

It appears that Michael Thomas via Internet-history <enervatron at gmail.com> said:
>into soc.motss was the internet's first gay newsgroup. It was created by 
>Steve Dyer late of BBN. It was a purposefully cryptic name to fly under 
>the radar.

In the 1980s I lived in Harvard Square around the corner from Steve
and his partner whose name I don't remember but who was, if such a
thing is possible, even nicer than he was. Everyone knew they were
gay which, fortunately in that part of Cambridge, was not a big deal.

Cambridge had an Internet co-op called Centnet, and Steve had a
blisteringly fast 56K DDS line that ran a few blocks from his house to
Centnet's router, above a local restaurant as I recall.

As an experiment I got a couple of Wavelan radio cards, a predecessor
to Wifi, put one of them in an old PS/2 in Steve's house with the
antenna stuck to a window, the other in an old PC in my attic with a
yagi pointing out the window towards's Steve's house a block away, and
set up pc-route on both machines with drivers and shims. Whaddaya
know, it worked. Centnet assigned me a spare /24 from their /16 (those
were the days) and I was now directly on the net.

Steve never let me pay him but I think we did take them out to dinner
a few times.

R's,
John