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]

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.

I'll look into it, thank you. BBS seem to be my best bet, it seems these were fairly popular in Japan and precursors to the forefathers of the OG 2chan.

The PFP is a screenshot from an old manga called Lupin III, it's weird but really fucking fun if you don't mind having to read scans of books from the 60's/70's.
Like this manga, the story i'm working on revolves around a bunch of criminals doing shit for money ; i had at some point the random idea of having a character be a computer nerd that works at the local police department and (along the widespread corruption) helped cover up their shit, on top of also being a fucking weirdo and a weeb. By sheer coincidence the character also ended up being Japanese, so here we are.

 

[analrapist]

A little past the time range, but HydrogenAudio was founded in 2001 to facilitate discussion and development of the MP3 audio codec and it's still not entirely dead today.

 

[Sultan Bin Jewstar]

revolves around a bunch of criminals doing shit for money

I edited this post while/after you posted this to include a book.
Highly recommend if you are interested in how easy it was to commit Internet crime in that time frame.

 

[The Connected Nose]

(m)irc

Was just a client. But yeah, EFnet, Undernet, DALnet.... the true "wild west" days of the intertubez.

 

[MrTroll]

The internet wasn't created until 2006. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

HeavenGames had some pretty active forums in the latter half of the 90s once Age of Empires and those classic Sierra city builders were released. I think pretty much all of them are still available for their respective games.

 

[David Floyd George]

I'll chime in here with Fark.com, founded in 1997, which used to be pretty good until maybe the mid-00s. Banning topless pictures of attractive women (the horror!) in order to attract advertisers was the beginning of its downfall, though it apparently still exists as some sort of legacy safe space for "edgy" progtards.

 

[Pee Cola]

According to the Telnet BBS Guide, there are currently over 1000 BBSs (A) online. A handful on the list are OG BBSs that have been up running since the '80s, but many new BBSs have sprouted up (plus some old ones have been restored and put back into service) over the past few years. This archive from 2017 shows there were 395 BBSs online back then.

I especially like seeing BBSs running on period correct hardware such as Apple IIs and Commodore 64s/128s (I'm getting a stiffy from just looking at those PETSCII graphics).

tbh I reckon KF would lend itself well to a BBS format. Granted images, audio. PDF and video would need to be dumped into a file download board rather than embedded in messages, but the idea of each lolcow having their own file download section tickles me in a perverse kind of way.

Given how little data a BBS needs and that BBSs still fly under the radar because they're not exactly normie-friendly, the chances of a KF-inspired BBS getting DDoSed into oblivion would be tiny, assuming you're not retarded enough to run it from your home Internet connection.

Better still, a whole bunch of like-minded SysOps could set up their own FidoNet-style network, so that files and posts can be spread out over many BBSs.

It's also impossible to DDoS a dial-up line or packet modem, so there's that.

 

[Cat Funt]

I remember MSN chat was big, and full of pornbots around 1999 or w/e. I was using Windows ME at the time on my kickass dell with a whole gig of ram (Click here to download extra RAM). Fuckin' Bonzibuddy.

 

[CoffeeCup]

I remember hanging about some old dude's forum way back in 2005 that was dedicated to a game franchise and sharing fanfiction. I did eventually meet up with members of that forum in NYC a couple years later But our friendship fell apart, partly due to drama and on top of the great recession bearing down on everyone.

 

[Grub]

I mostly just remember webrings with weird janky personal webpages that sometimes would lead you to fucked up disturbing shit. It was a lot like clicking through random wikipedia links and ending up on something totally unrelated to where you started except the entire internet was like that. I remember going on gamefaqs in the 90's but I can't remember if they had a forum back then or not. I do remember reading a lot of different forums in the late 90's early, 2000's. It feels like there was a time when almost everything became a forum or a message board of some kind around then.

 

[Private Tag Reporter]

Forums are more late 90's/early 00's, while bulletin boards were running strong through the early '90s through early '00s. The main difference being BBSes were more purely textual and less graphical, while a forum is usually has markup/styling and avatars/profile pictures.

Also don't forget mailing lists, which are still used to this day, mostly in programming circles. You send in an email to a mailing list and everyone subscribed gets a copy of that email. Some mailing rings would also keep an archive, so you can go back and follow threads, much in the same way you can on a forum.

 

[Banquet Meal]

i remember one of the 1st websites i ever visited was mermin.com, in 98....typical gore bullshit, but teenage me was like WTF

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I started getting into discussion boards in the early '00s.

They were pretty much like KF, except no stickers or likes.

 

[grump]

very early 90s forums would probably be dominated by BBS and USEnet and mailing lists. As you move a little bit some 90s style forums would pop up. But you can't forget about AOL even though everybody seems to.

AOL was the dominant internet service of the 90s in America and since America was the bulk of the online population at this point, the world. If you want to know what was the closest equivalent to the social media or the internet community as we know it today it would be the labyrinthine AOL chatroom networks.

Like today the nerds stubbornly stuck with their finicky hard to use BBSes and USEnet newsgroups and looked down on AOL as unwashed peasants. But AOL was the internet for the common man and woman. Yep women too, Unlike the 'real' internet there were females on AOL.

There were world within worlds in the networks catering to every imaginable interest and subgroup. Imagine reddit and discord but while still dumb as mud not as politicized no where near as controlled and seemingly far larger with virtually everybody on the internet (except the elite nerds) crammed into it. Combine it with the ability to create private rooms on the fly, the lack of even the most rudimentary automated tools let alone AI to help the janny teams who had to go everywhere and do everything manually, and a generally more carefree freedom loving attitude in society with no sjws and far less effective nannyism and you had glorious chaos.

It was the wild west in a way the internet had not been until that point and has never been again since. Every day you'd go exploring having no idea what you would find. In one room you'd find complete degeneracy and in the next you'd find a community of people devoted to knitting oven mitts and in the next hot nude pics and pirated movies. You'd have the most pansy communities right aside ones that would make the 'dark web' look like a playground joke. You could easily strike up friendships and even relationships with other random people in a way that was startling easy compared to how it is today and talk for hours. You could gain magic powers and do crazy things like boot people, make them spout nonsense or scroll the chat endlessly. But being an ecriminal means living on the edge. You'd have to evade the authorities the AOL janny 'hosts' and their deputized mods as they'd chase you through the twisting tunnels of the impossibly vast network like some futuristic crime film and move from room to room doing busts locked in an eternal struggle with the underground groups. It was so much more how we imagined living on the internet would be like.

What a pity its all gone know. What a pity later generations will never be able to experience the true untamed Internet that older folks knew. Ironic how a monopoly by one company once upon a time had a freer internet than the oligarchy we have today.

 

[guiltyspark85]

I can remember UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board) being popular forum software in the late 90s. I can't remember any specific forums though - I mostly used mailing lists. UBB used a flatfile database so wasn't good for anything beyond small communities. phpBB and vBulletin came along around 2000, and they used MySQL which could handle much more traffic.