[grymoire1]

I remember connecting in 1983/84. It was a trial by fire. I started learning Unix by using the Eunice emulator on VMS. I was doing such a good job on documentation (using nroff), that I convinced my company to buy a Sun workstation. I poured through the manual, especially the section on UUCP, and first con a connection to a local college using a modem. I was able to use UUCP to copy the mail and news software. In those days, the standard response to a question was RTFM - in other words, read the source code and follow the instructions. If you can't do that - you shouldn't try to connect to the 'Net.

So you had to slowly bootstrap yourself in technology. Once you were able to read and post news, you next needed to send email to people. And that meant you had to master UUCP mail. Unlike domains, it was a route. You had to specify each step in the relay. So you might need to specify 5 or 6 specific systems by name to reach the desired person. And hope they could find a route back to you.

Most of all - the great part of the early days was respect, and the ration of information to noise. Inaccurate information didn't remain unchallenged. If you asked a question, it was very likely the author of the technology or program would answer you. Often others would pipe in answering simple questions, so that the program creator wouldn't have to be distracted from important work.

It was a humbling experience, especially when you said something that was factually inaccurate, or technically naive. One learned to think and research before responding to anything.

Until the freshmen classes came to college in September......

Normally there was a very formal process to creating newsgroups, but the alt.* distribution was uncontrolled, and a system that had a well regulated and automated process for the creation of newsgroups evolved into newsgroup creation/deletion wars.

And then we had the first spam. And then we had trolls. And anti-spam filters cause anti-anti-spam generators to be created. And then the web was implemented.