Tell us about your first time...

from WinCustomize Forums
..that you were in an on-line community.

I started with this whole "virtual community" stuff back in 1987 when I ran a Commodore 64 BBS. We had about 200 to 300 members on the BBS. You used your phone modem to call the number of the BBS and connected to it. It was run on C-net 12.0 and later Image 1.0

That was how I met Pat (T-man). He ran a BBS called King Arthur's Court. I ran the BBS "Stardock".

All these BBSes had multiple access groups (0 through 9) and when we posted, our access rank was put in front of our name. So when I posted on Pat's BBS, I would be Lord Macros (that was my handle). On my BBS it would be Admiral Macros.

We tried to focus our BBSes to mainly be about the message boards. In order to download, you had to have X number of points and the only way to get those points was to post and respond in the message boards. This system worked pretty well. It was a really fun way to meet people in the local area who had like interests.

Not much has changed, as the "community" got bigger, the usual sorts of squables one sees here and on other websites would pop up. But most posts had to do about talking about "stuff" like the meaning of life, finding out what girls wanted in guys and vice versa. There were only a handful of girls versus a ton of guys.

Now, 14 years later (good gawd it's been that long?) not too much has really changed in terms of on-line communities. Sure, the people are from all over the world and they can all be on at once (as I type this, there are 295 other people currently on this website) but the message boards are almost all the same as they were then. Right down to the "what song are you listening to right now?" stuff.

So what place did you first learn about on-line communities?
8,074 views 24 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Although I used the internet fairly regularly since '93, the only kind of connection available to me was dial up, and in the UK, that's a local call, which costs money, so I tended to make my visits to the net fairly brief and to the point. When I moved to North America in '98, I started hanging out on IRC as a way to stay in touch with some of my friends back home, which was no longer a problem thanks to the wonders of cable and dsl. Now I'm pretty much always on IRC. As for the forums here, I just decided to see what was going on in here one day, and can't remember exactly what caused me to post, probably had to correct Jafo on a spelling mistake. Since then I tend to while away the small hours of the morning on this messageboard while everyone on IRC is asleep, and I can't sleep, because since working on a contract basis, I seem to have unwittingly reverted to the nocturnal stage that I went through in my late teens.
Reply #2 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Correct me on a speling mistaik?....Yeah, right....
My initiation was at Customize when it was considered kewl to be more artistic with your comments than you ever could be with your work.
Then along came skinz.....and more of the same, really, only your protagonists were better armed...
I'd always enjoy a good argument, but my typing prowess is 'borderline sux', therefore I tend to keep things short [ish], and polish up on my vitriol...
So that's only about 4 years online.
Call me a newbie...
The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top
..been online since about '94.
skinz was the first site that i started visiting on a regular basis......my addiction grew from there i guess
Reply #4 from WinCustomize Forums Top
since 96 on some brazilian cummunite sites. My first time on....errr... international cummunities was in Skinz. org, in 99 (3 years to take the courage to show you all my "fantastic" English spell )
Reply #5 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I ran "The Rebel BBS" for years and years before the BBS world pretty much died. I don't remember exactly when I started, but it would have to be sometime in the early '80s, I would think.

Started out on an Atari 800XL. Moved up to a 130XE, then a 1040ST and finally a Falcon030. I even ran for awhile on a stock 1040ST with no hard drive when I first got it. Such was the efficiency of programs back then.

Most everything back in the early days was modem to modem. If someone was on your BBS, everyone else was locked out. Still it was real cool, and a little more personal in some ways.

I remember it was such a great feeling getting callers to my BBS. I ran the support BBS for BBS! Express for awhile, and I was getting traffic from not only around the country, but around the world. That was very, very cool.

Then along came FidoNet, which let you be part of a worldwide community, without worrying about busy signals, or even callers to your BBS for that matter. And then along with it, AtariNet, NeST and my own MusicNet.

I still kind of miss some of the aspects of sysoping, such as spying on someone when they're on your BBS , but you can't beat the efficiency and pure volume of places like this and the various newsservers.
Reply #6 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Purrrr......you don't Even wanna know!

Reply #7 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Purrrr... Everytime that hat pops up in your store ad..I bust out laughing!
Reply #8 from WinCustomize Forums Top
At the-gas-station - http://www.the-gas-station.com/ - a music technology messageboard back in 1996 I guess, most of the people I remeber are still there now, but I posted under a different psuedonym back then, a well used one which was already taken when I joined skinz.

There wwere some almighty religion/politics debates going on back then, and they continue today, and there is even one thread that is still running from back then I think... "Ye Olde Oberheim Abbey" iirc.

Kind of left it behind whwen I kcame to skinz, but still pop back now and then, usually lurking.
Reply #10 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I'd tell ya my history but it looks like Frogboy pretty much covered it all. But he did forget to mention that at the time he was a 15 year old geek!
Reply #11 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I got started with a Radio Shack Color Computer. (yea, OLD) Eventually ran a BBS on it under an operating system called "OS/9". Eventually moved to the PC and started "The Silicon Sysop" which I ran under Desqview for many years. After running a BBS for almost 10 years, for a while I had no interest whatsoever in any kind of electronic messages. Two years ago I came upon the "bad brown place" where I was drawn in by some of the locals and, well, here I is!
Reply #12 from WinCustomize Forums Top
My first touch with the virtual world was as a member, then an admin, in a FirstClass BBS from Softarc (on the Mac platform) in Montreal called Eureka. That was around 1992. Although there were some downloads available, all shareware and freeware, the BBS was mostly constituted of forums (then called "conferences"). That was before newsgroups and the Internet were popular.
FirstClass doesn't call itself a BBS system anymore but a "Unified Messaging" system.
I just went to take a look, and it's funny how although they changed the product definition, it's essentially still the same as it was. You can take a look at http://www.user.firstclass.com/Login/ (login as "guest" with "guest" also as a password.
Reply #13 from WinCustomize Forums Top
My first bits of IRC was through military network systems. System admins and Comm Center Operators used IRC on the secure networks as a means of facilitating the processesing and transfer of classified messages. I wouldn't necessarily consider that BBS type of activity, but exposure nonetheless.

For "public internet" type stuff, my first places to call home were a chat room called "The Coffee Gallery" hosted on the tristero network. Seems those King Arthurs Courts were popular as that was the room I used to hang around in back in 95. The first Buletin Board system I believe was Skinz and also some newsgroups.
Reply #15 from WinCustomize Forums Top
It looks like here is a reunion of BBS freaks
I am glad that I am not the only one
Long before Internet, with modems 1.2 or less, I don't remember exactly, the things where very difficult and we where happy JUST to communicate, nowadays is very easy and has lost the fun, but it is International and it is more interesting, (with disadvantage for those who don't speak well English).
Reply #16 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I loved BBS's and frequented several from '89 - '91. I remember getting the free computer magazines to get an updated list of BBS phone numbers. Back then a big shareware app might be as big as 120k and images almost never got over 80k. Transfer speeds were so bad downloading 300k would take me about an hour. There were application specific drivers for video cards, geeky utilities, graphics format converters and viewers and lots of other cool stuff you could only get from a BBS. One of my favorites was a guy in Mountain View that made a virus scanner and was updating the definitions everytime a new one would be found. It was a free service called McAffee. Even my communications software was free (Procomm) but eventually became a full blown expensive app.
I skipped the internet for a long time, was never interested in chat rooms, porn or gaming and I thought that was the only thing happening on the internet, and only got online again when I found usenet in '97 and the wealth of information being passed around there.
Reply #17 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I found my skinz.org signup email while digging through old emails at school. Seems I sold my soul the 24th of june 1999.
Reply #18 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Actually that must have been '95, not '97... memory is such an imprecise thing when it comes to time. I got online shortly after upgrading to win95 because they gave me a free copy of some internet software with the OS... something Compuserve owned.
Reply #19 from WinCustomize Forums Top
Ahhh David... your mention of ProComm reminded me how fond I was of Qmodem. I started my BBS with the free RBBS software and eventually bought a copy of PCBoard and was running 3 nodes.
Reply #20 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I dont remember the date but it "was at skinz.org" and I remember ChinaCat was already there cuz her name caught me strange.
All I know is it was "sometime" after ChinaCat... hehe

I think I just asked some stupid question and that was all it took =/

it's a curse!!!

Reply #21 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I think I started this..erm....dunno time..but I'll tell you where I stand with the sites.

When I first knew that customize.org existed, the site was dying. I never really got into it. I was actually there for about 2 months of its last existance.....

Then customize died and skinz and deskmod got started. Was there for both of them...from beginning to death. Was here when wincustomize got started.

I'm still rather new to the community compared to the time some of you have already spent..but you all have taught me a lot . It was also that I learned about the on-line communities through good ol' #skinnerz when we were still on efnet (Doesn't that seem like forever ago?)

Reply #23 from WinCustomize Forums Top
I spent about a year interning (er, assisting, as it was only a one-man operation besides myself) at a local BBS in Charleston, SC dedicated to local Star Trek fans. (Yeah, so I was a geek; what of it?). I had no idea what I was doing; I just pressed whatever buttons and typed whatever lines I was told to by my [boss] (who looked amazingly like Santa Claus). There was no pay involved.

A year or so later I got my first PC, with a fresh copy of the revolutionary Windows 95, and started using my 9600bps modem, hitting sites, playing MUDs, and hanging out in IRC. MUDs were perhaps my first online community, old ones like "Legend of the Red Dragon Inn." I eventually spent far too much time in MUSH.

MUDs and MUSHs have lost their appeal to me now, I hate IRC with a passion, and the sites I visit daily can be counted on my fingers. And the whole IM thing passed me by (I never use any sort of IM; I hate them as much as IRC).

These days I come here, and I'm an active member on a couple of email-based communities and a scant number of other messageing sites and newsgroups. The end.
Reply #24 from WinCustomize Forums Top
My first initiation into an online community was at GlobalMUSH. Anyone remember Mushing? It's way cooler than IRC ever was. That was back in 93 or so, on a Tandy with no HD and a borrowed 1200baud modem. It's also where I first met Juni.

It can still be found at telnet://tarsier.domain.net 4201, but it's kinda dead nowadays.