🚀 go-pugleaf

"Simon Belmont" in  news:RipUb.13128$wo6.3461@newssvr22.news.prodigy.com...
> OT:
>
> I took a look at your wine related post from Oct. 7, 1983.

Grad student days.  Also grew up in Berkeley.  Many more interesting bits of
info by _email_ if you like, I could add you to a small private mailing list
or two on food and wine.  (No spam, no flamers -- in summary, no horseshit.)

> Anyhow, you have been posting since before I knew newsgroups
> even existed.  I guess back then it was posted to a BBS network?

You may set experienced users' teeth on edge with that acronym.
(Clueless-newbie idiom from the late 1980s was to call newsgroups "this
board" or "BBS").  "Bulletin-Board Services" were a particular
(special-purpose) flavor of dial-up timesharing computer service.
(Timesharing services have been demonstrably popular in the US since the
early 1970s.)

Nutshell history:

The newsgroups were set up to use the Internet when possible but
store-and-forward by separate telephone protocols (from late 1970s) as
necessary so that Internet access was never prerequisite to them.  They were
accessed by many people also in Internet-connected facilities (universities,
companies, govt agencies like National Bureau of Standards).  For the last
20 years, newsgroup access and other Internet capabilities have been pretty
universally available to people in the US (either via Internet or by dial-up
access to timesharing, which required no personal computer, only a
terminal).  You did however need to (1) know they existed and (2) know how
to use them, by various newsreaders and other tools, mostly text-based.  The
pointy-clicky Internet tools (HTTP/HTML protocols) came later and helped to
spread the popularity of the Internet (including to people who have never
even read the basic introduction RFC1855, still universally available and
recommended by all literate Internet tutorials).  Internet history is very
routinely misapprehended and misrepresented by people unaware of anything
occurring there before they happened to hear of it.  I said in print in 1999
that even in retrospective accounts, many people seem to prefer to assert
"the Internet did not yet exist" rather than "I didn't know of it."  Anyway
that's my nutshell account for what it's worth.

Copyright 2004.