If there was any, what kind of early forums were around during 1995/1996 and/or the late 90's ? - and other Old Internet shenanigans (which reminds me i really gotta start looking into a timeline of the early internet)

[7.62x38mmR]

It's one of these days again, where i'm sick like a dog and stuck at home with a mushy brain, so i decided to pull back out an old writing project and start working on it again.
Considering the setting, i was starting to look into the state of the internet during the 90's, and while it's a mess, i've got a good source to help me up understand better how things were back in the days. Issue is, my source is a frog whose expertise is mostly into more local stuff that doesn't really apply well to the rest of the world.
I've been naturally looking into a few image boards and old forums i myself use and other adjacents, but sadly most of them seem to "only" date back to the late 90's, leading me to believe that sort of a "Cambrian explosion" of forums happened around that time, which i believe is correlated by a sudden spike in internet users around that time thanks to operating systems like Windows 95 and Windows 98 making the web easier and more intuitive to access.
However, as you've probably guessed, there's very little i can find on websites precedding this. I suppose the low population and archaic infrastructure likely had a big role in this, but even then i always figured out IT nerds would have already coalesced to messaging platforms by then.
Which brings me to the following question : would the oldfags out there happen to know anything about the kind of websites (even if it's just blogs or random shit like this honestly) that were around back in the day ?

 

[Fastest Hand In The East]

my source is a frog

You already sold me on the book.

 

[Cat Funt]

some are still alive

http://www.aliweb.com/

it was all geocities when I started.

 

[Fata v3]

My memory is most of it was usenet, (m)irc and bbs back then. Was pretty common for the bigger sites to link to an irc channel for community engagement.

Forums (phbb whatever) seemed like they came into their own in the very early 00s.

 

[7.62x38mmR]

You already sold me on the book.

I really don't wanna promise anything, since it's my second time attempting something like this. I can see the progress i've made, but i'll probably hold on publishing anything until i can get a few chapters and some friends to proofread it.

 

[Summer of George]

Ezboard started up in, I think, 1996. But they didn't really reach their pinnacle til about 99-00. It was probably the biggest web-based forum host of the time.

To speak to the explosion of Internet users in general, America Online was responsible for a huge chunk of that. In 1997 they began offering monthly plans and loads of people hopped on board. Prior to that, they had billed by the hour.

 

[Pee Cola]

The oldest forum I know of is The Saab Network. Probably only of any use if you own a Saab, but it's cool how it hasn't changed since the '90s.

 

[Raven of the Burning God]

Network News Transfer Protocol. NNTP. Been around since the ARPANET days.
As a social network, Usenet Newsgroups. You can still find Usenet archives.
Google Groups, though now defunct, still maintains archives.

Something Awful and Stile Project had pretty active forums.
I assume Newgrounds, AlbinoBlackSheep, etc. had their own, too.

 

[Solid Snek]

Late 90s was when you started to seeing "proper" forums crop up; image boards and blogs started getting popular a little bit later, early and mid 2000s.

Before forums, it was mainly things like:

personal webpages (e.g. Geocities or Angelfire, often organized into "rings", some of which you can find on Internet Archives but almost all of which are long dead by now. Like blogs but you had to know at least a little bit of html to design one, setting a bar to entry and leading to insanity),


chatrooms and IRC (scrolly text things that don't save content for long, like the one which is on the front page of KF for some reason; very popular with AOL and a beachhead for normie incursions into digital space. Unarchived by design),


and Usenet/BBS/mailing lists (like forums but text-only and with a slightly higher nerd/pedo-normie ratio than today; iirc there are still archives of that stuff available)

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Pretty sure Gamefaqs was around. I was only there as an underage b7 in the early 00s, but the place had a pretty wild forum culture and all the old stories were well-known. You had all the classics--people would post their suicides, people would do offsite raids like going to a guestbook of some girl who killed herself and writing funny memes, all that shit. The jannies were also psycho and would at minimum delete your post if you wrote f*** instead of ****, you couldn't say "sucks" or "ass" in topic titles, and you'd get banned for posting ASCII art of Mario riding Yoshi. The site owner, CJayC, also once called up some 12 year old's mom because the 12 year old would spend all day trolling. It was like Something Awful, but "not as bad" (supposedly), and you didn't have to pay tenbux to enter.

Most people found it because they were looking up guides for long-ass RPGs on SNES or PSX. These "FAQs" were written by teenagers entirely in text and could be pretty wild themselves, like I remember I once found a FAQ for Super Smash Bros Melee that was full of weird jokes about Kirby being a racist and a sex pervert.

But it seemed like everyone had a forum back then. Just tonight I read the OP for the thread here on Lipstick Alley, which says the NFL player Eddie George had a forum that got taken over by psycho black chicks who then had to start their own forum. Wild shit.

 

[7.62x38mmR]

Thanks for the good stuff lads.
I kinda messed up by choosing to an have imageboard weeb as a character when the story is set in the mid-90's, but eh there's no turning back now.
The issue of a police department having an IT department in the 90's is mostly solved (that's a big part of the character and i wasn't sure if it would be believable), but now i gotta find how to make that work with 90's internet. By some unholy mix of luck and me having an autistic naming scheme, the character ended up Japanese, so that helps, but still that's gonna take some time.

PS : you can roughly guess what kind of story it is by my PFP

 

[BradeRunna]

Forums aren't really new. Back in the mid to late 80's there were things called BBS's or Bulletin Board Systems. They were kind of like proto forums. There was an archive of one called FidoNet I found back in the late 2000's while looking into UFO and conspiritard shit back then. There were plenty of BBS's back in the 80's and early 90's. I think they were still being used in the early to mid 90's. You have to keep in mind that back then PC's were not common like they are now or became after the year 2000. Back in the 80's and early to mid 90's PC's were pretty expensive so this made their ownership really niche. It was mostly the middle class and upper middle class that could afford to own a PC back then. Unless someone was lucky to run across someone's old junk computer and knew how to fix it. PC's were still in the hundreds of dollars range to even thousands. I believe a PC in the mid to late 80's could well over $1,000 and possibly even over 2,000. They were not cheap. You didn't start seeing affordable computers till the very late 90's and early 2000's.

Your best bet would be to look into an old BBS systems. I remember seeing a picture of what someone claimed to be the first example of internet porn. It was basically a nude picture of some female someone managed to get on a BBS I believe in the late 80's or early 90's. I was born in 1984 and didn't get a PC myself till around 2000. What I know of BBS's comes from doing google searches about them.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

Thanks for the good stuff lads.
I kinda messed up by choosing to an have imageboard weeb as a character when the story is set in the mid-90's, but eh there's no turning back now.
The issue of a police department having an IT department in the 90's is mostly solved (that's a big part of the character and i wasn't sure if it would be believable), but now i gotta find how to make that work with 90's internet. By some unholy mix of luck and me having an autistic naming scheme, the character ended up Japanese, so that helps, but still that's gonna take some time.

PS : you can roughly guess what kind of story it is by my PFP

2ch was like THE first example of imageboard culture even though it wasn't an imageboard. Good ol' Gookmoot himself started it way back in 1999 and it was an exceptionally popular site in Japan.

 

[7.62x38mmR]

Forums aren't really new. Back in the mid to late 80's there were things called BBS's or Bulletin Board Systems. They were kind of like proto forums. There was an archive of one called FidoNet I found back in the late 2000's while looking into UFO and conspiritard shit back then. There were plenty of BBS's back in the 80's and early 90's. I think they were still being used in the early to mid 90's. You have to keep in mind that back then PC's were not common like they are now or became after the year 2000. Back in the 80's and early to mid 90's PC's were pretty expensive so this made their ownership really niche. It was mostly the middle class and upper middle class that could afford to own a PC back then. Unless someone was lucky to run across someone's old junk computer and knew how to fix it. PC's were still in the hundreds of dollars range to even thousands. I believe a PC in the mid to late 80's could well over $1,000 and possibly even over 2,000. They were not cheap. You didn't start seeing affordable computers till the very late 90's and early 2000's.

Your best bet would be to look into an old BBS systems. I remember seeing a picture of what someone claimed to be the first example of internet porn. It was basically a nude picture of some female someone managed to get on a BBS I believe in the late 80's or early 90's. I was born in 1984 and didn't get a PC myself till around 2000. What I know of BBS's comes from doing google searches about them.

I've vaguely heard of BBSs getting wiped out by the WWW, but i've got no idea how they worked or anything.
Thanks for the tip

 

[stupid frog]

Fanpages used to have webrings that were like links to pages with the same theme, but I never understood how they worked (mostly because they all seemed dead). I donno if this helps you, but there's some old irrelevant info.

 

[Syntaxion]

Sheeeit im pretty sure there were more screenshots, some from the early to mid 90s, but I'll post this one because it's my favourite

 

[7.62x38mmR]

View attachment 6969648
Sheeeit im pretty sure there were more screenshots, some from the early to mid 90s, but I'll post this one because it's my favourite

I was thinking about this one too lmao

 

[gampboonerisms]

I was online starting 99. So i was heavy into geocities pages made for fanfiction, webring hosting, and yahoo groups. Found out sqidge.org is still alive, minotour is dead, and there are some archives still being hosted.

 

[Hweeks]

Anyone remember Totse (temple of the screaming electron)?

 

[Sultan Bin Jewstar]

PS : you can roughly guess what kind of story it is by my PFP

A coming-of-age pooner?



Look into The WELL. It predates your range, but exists today.
Bbs and irc are probably the closest to what you want.

Spoiler: Maybe off topic

I don't remember for sure, but I vaguely remember Cliff Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg talking about the stuff that came immediately before the period you're after. He gives a pretty understandable explanation of how shit worked.
The point in time you're after is unique because household internet was a luxury and people would often only be able to use work computers.

After Stoll gained some notoriety, he gave us one of the least correct assertions [in hindsight] about the Internet. This gives a better idea of why there just weren't all that many options at the time:

...the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.