Anybody else having flashbacks to #Usenet or #fidonet in the 1980s? If so, what were your usual haunts?
Triple-dipping grad schools mid journalism career (#WesleyanUniversity x2, #UNC ), my main newsgroups were #rec.music.folk #alt.hypertext and #rec.boats
I freelanced for computer mags while staff at boating mag #Soundings; wrote about computers-and-boats more than expected:
CS profs & software entrepreneurs with boats, boating forums on #thewell or #CompuServe, & the '90s dawn of #WWW
I ran two of the earliest #fidonet sites, one at #ByteMagazine and another personal one in my basement. #johnmarkoff and I discovered #tomjennings as he was first hatching the idea of #fido in the early 80s. I was West Coast Bureau Chief for Byte, and John (who had just migrated over from InfoWorld) theoretically worked for me.
I was in San Francisco. John and Paul Friedlander shared an office in Palo Alto in the same building as Living Videotext, home of (drumroll here) Dave Winer and his brother Peter (aka Boozer). Their outliner was called ThinkTank. Their second product, aptly named More, had my name and “address” on its slipcase. How I got to Byte after being corporate communications director at #Kaypro is a longer demented story for another time. :)
I was also the chairman of the First International Fido Conference in St. Louis which almost devolved into a fistfight, which is another bizarre story. I had almost forgotten this stuff. Footnote: Markoff went on to be the technology guy at the New York Times.
Bob Stepno
Ezra Shapiro