in the 80s 'online' was often very local . you learned not to say things you wouldnt say to that persons face because there was every chance you would run into them at some local gathering of users.
this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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Indeed and this very thing happened to me as I was a teenager talking shit to a user on our local MajorBBS system, which was a popular multi line BBS system that had chat, games, forums, fidonet, etc. and he showed up to the next meetup at the park (he did warn me he was going to be there, to kick my ass). Everything turned out fine but lesson learned.
Sounds quite similar to CB radio.
I'm pretty sure that I still don't know everything I need to know about online discourse.
I am a monkey with a typewriter
By being a part of online discourse as early as 1993 and watching it grow pretty much from inception.
If you count the telegraph as online communication, it'd go back to the mid-1800s.
FUCK YOU.
STRONGLY WORDED LETTER TO FOLLOW.
"Back in my day, we weren't online, we did lines! And there were fuckin' ninjas on the lawn tryna kill us, too!"
Kids and their chats today have it easy, man.
https://home.nps.gov/people/hettie-ogle.htm
Hettie moved to Johnstown on 1869 to manage the Western Union telegraph office where she was employed on the day of the flood. Her residence was 110 Washington Street, next to the Cambria County Library. This also served as the Western Union office. Unlike many other telegraph operators associated with messaging on the day of the flood, Hettie was not employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad. She was a commercial operator. Three women were employed by Hettie; Grace Garman, Mary Jane Waktins and her daughter Minnie. They all died in the flood including Hettie.
A timeline of Hettie's activity on May 31, 1889:
7:44 a.m. -She sent a river reading. The water level was 14 feet.
10:44 a.m. -The river level was 20 feet.
11:00 a.m. -She wired the following message to Pittsburgh. "Rain gauge carried away."
12:30 p.m. -She wired "Water higher than ever known. Can't give exact measurement" to Pittsburgh.
1:00 p.m. -Hettie moved to the second floor of her home due to the rising water.
3:00 p.m. -Hettie alerted Pittsburgh about the dam after receiving a warning from South Fork that the dam "may possibly go." She wired "this is my last message." The water was grounding her wires. A piece of sheet music titled "My Last Message" was published after the flood.Hettie's house on Washington Street was struck by the flood wave shortly after 4:00 p.m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 230 metres (750 ft) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee. Coleman remembered that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys." Coleman's message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately.[71][72] Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train from Saint John, is believed to have heeded the warning and stopped a safe distance from the blast at Rockingham, saving the lives of about 300 railway passengers. Coleman was killed at his post.[71]
NO TOP POSTING
lol
I still automatically think "YOUR .SIG IS TOO HUGE!" when reading modern work emails with rows upon rows of name, job title, company, contact info, disclaimers, embedded graphics, etc. at the bottom.
I started in a/s/l? chat rooms, but as social media has evolved, so has the discourse. I think I had to relearn every time I changed platforms.
CS 1.6
tumblr
AOL LOLOL1
ASL?
I'm pretty sure American sign language looks different than that.
By being terminally online since the previous century.
Runescape
Started with online BBS's in the 1980s where you could get kicked off for being a dick (and your phone number banned) but Larry Wall's "rn" for Usenet used to say before every post:
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Chomsky
&totse and IRC mostly
Usenet and IRC, back in the late 90s. Damn I'm getting old.
I'm still learning, despite being around it for over 2 decades at this point.
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MMOs and forums.
It wasn't just one place. It wasn't even all online.
AOL 3.0
AOL 2.1 because I was on Mac at the time. Good ol' #macwarez!
Oh the warez rooms were amazing! That’s how I finally got to play C&C: Red Alert lol
Haha damn! I remember seeing that on the daily mailers. I was busy getting the Adobe stuff like Photoshop and Illustrator, also QuarkXpress for page layout because fuck MS Word. Good times!
Over thirty years ago, on TALK.
Alt.flame. iykyk
On MMOs, trying not to sound like a kid, even though I was a kid, so I could join groups of cool people and guilds. Learned a lot of American lingo on Reddit.
Online.
The starwars.com forum long before the Disney purchase killed it, then Digg until the v4 update, then Reddit until the APIpocalypse.
So many communities I've seen wrecked by corporate greed. The Fediverse gives me hope for people being able to interact online without having to worry about the enshittification.
The NME (popular British music paper) had a website with a chat room/board that I was active on in the late 90s. I was about 17.
They also gave you free webmail with a @nme.com address, so you felt like a music journalist. Unfortunately, they shut it all down out of the blue in the 00s, with little warning, so I lost my primary email address. Would love to recover all those messages, but they are gone forever.
I was going to say AIM (AOL), but really it was Yahoo! Games. Specifically Towers with a little bit of Pool mixed in.
Oh man, I am not the primary demographic of lemmy am I?
Making as many mistakes, missteps, misunderstandings, misconceptions and misses as possible.
Team Fortress 2 custom servers
Napster chatrooms
Hmmm, I think my gateway drug to interacting with actual Internet strangers vs talking online with people I knew IRL, was probably via StarCraft over dial-up in 1998. RuneScape shortly after for developing actual relationships with people, then WoW owned my soul from its vanilla release through the cata expansion.
Several WoW guilds had their own websites/forums, which eventually got me into forums for other topics, then Reddit, then here.
Thank god I was able to learn on the early days of the internet
4chan taught me that, in a highly uncivilised world, the best thing to do is be kind and keep your dignity. It'll either calm people's spirits or infuriate others, and I enjoy both, lol. Also, words don't have to hurt, especially those from online strangers!
Discussing online.
As many others have said IRC and usenet in the 90's
Nexopia and NinjaVideo forums.
Yes, I am Unc and chopped.
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