Internet Forums (or Fora) history?

[miktec]

Not pedants corner ... just a bit of curiosity....

My very shaky understanding of the origins of forums (or fora) is that they have two possible primitive origins:

1. A means for the military to discuss research findings/goals with University depts during the early years of development of nodal communication systems (under the aegis of ARPANET ?)

2. A means by which IBM engineers 'in the field' could get in touch with colleagues to discuss/solve installation issues they were faced with.

(I said it was shaky knowledge - and very likely urban myth to boot...)

I know from reading various threads on PFM that there are quite a few who were involved with computing way back when and would care to give some insight that actually makes more sense/is more accurate than what I ventured above.
... some indication of the decade(s) in question would be useful in posts to put things in context (e.g. 70s, 80s, etc.)

- and yes - I do know I can use Google, read a book or watch documentaries. More interested in poster's personal experience/memories though (the reason I visit a forum really)

 

[Yank]

Whatever the original intended purpose, I'm sure they devolved into porn sharing and cat pictures as soon as there was enough bandwidth to support images.

 

[Mike Reed]

Whatever the pros, cons, origins (except Latin) etc., it's forums. Fora is not a plural of forum.

 

[sp25]

Was the original term "bulletin boards" or did another name precede that?

 

[miktec]

Was the original term "bulletin boards" or did another name precede that?

That sounds right ... also discussion groups (although they may have been message based - pre or post actual 'email'?) but memory is a bit hazy and based on things I read years ago.

Be also interesting to hear when other posters first became aware of forums on the internet and how they discovered them.

 

[Darth Vader]

That sounds right ... also discussion groups (although they may have been message based - pre or post actual 'email'?) but memory is a bit hazy and based on things I read years ago.

Be also interesting to hear when other posters first became aware of forums on the internet and how they discovered them.

In the days before the WWW we had netnews. A collection of a very large number of forums on almost every topic. You had to be reasonably technical to use the correct network protocol for the job in hand.

I remember the excitement when Mosaic was released - the first web browser Mosaic Web Browser History - NCSA, Marc Andreessen, Eric Bina | LivingInternet I was working for ESOC in Darmstadt at the time using Sun workstations running UNIX

DV

 

[narabdela]

Whatever the pros, cons, origins (except Latin) etc., it's forums. Fora is not a plural of forum.

I disagree. Either is acceptable according to both the OED and Merriam-Webster.

As someone who studied Latin, I find "forums" and "stadiums" clumsy and positively uncomfortable, but that's my problem.

I'll stick with"fora" and "stadia".

 

[chartz]

We use both in French too. But forums is more common.

 

[Tony L]

Whatever the original intended purpose, I'm sure they devolved into porn sharing and cat pictures as soon as there was enough bandwidth to support images.

That was there right since the very beginning. ASCII porn on mainframes was a thing back before any internet!

The forums kind of grew out of bulletin boards and Usenet newsgroups. The alt. newsgroups being the unregulated precursors of 4Chan etc and full of exactly the same hate, bigotry, porn and piracy as you’ll find on the darkweb today. Binary images and even pirate software was encoded in a text format on plain text messages. This all before the www revolutionised access, though it does still exist in some form even today. I used Usenet a lot before the www really took off, my tool of choice was Forte Agent, which was versatile email and newsgroup reader. It was nice having both combined in the one app.

I’m sure a fair few here have been around long enough to remember downloading crap from newsgroups via a 14.4 modem or even slower. IIRC my first online experience was at 9.6 baud via an Amstrad 1640 DOS machine!

 

[chartz]

Those were epic days. The 56k modem was a blessing

 

[Mike P]

I heard a very interesting podcast about this subject recently. I think it was Radio 4 but I'm not sure. I'll try and find it for you.

Anyway, you might like to catch before it disappears.

 

[miktec]

... some indication of the decade(s) in question would be useful in posts to put things in context

(e.g. 70s, 80s, etc.)

 

[JensenHealey]

We have a chap at work who, many years ago (25?), ran up a £700+ phone bill using BB's to play some game or other. He needed help to resolve the problem.

 

[chartz]

I clearly remember switching off the 56k after each session. Surfing the web was awfully expensive back then.

 

[Tony L]

We have a chap at work who, many years ago (25?), ran up a £700+ phone bill using BB's to play some game or other. He needed help to resolve the problem.

There was a period before the phone companies got wise and you could add your ISP to a ‘friends and family’ or whatever deal where you paid a little more each month and those calls were free. Lasted about a year as I recall, then they blocked it.

PS I remember going through all the modems as they came out; 9.6, 14.4, 28.8, 56k etc. I bet I’ve still got a 56k ISA card in my bits box

 

[Darth Vader]

That was there right since the very beginning. ASCII porn on mainframes was a thing back before any internet!

The forums kind of grew out of bulletin boards and Usenet newsgroups. The alt. newsgroups being the unregulated precursors of 4Chan etc and full of exactly the same hate, bigotry, porn and piracy as you’ll find on the darkweb today. Binary images and even pirate software was encoded in a text format on plain text messages. This all before the www revolutionised access, though it does still exist in some form even today. I used Usenet a lot before the www really took off, my tool of choice was Forte Agent, which was versatile email and newsgroup reader. It was nice having both combined in the one app.

I’m sure a fair few here have been around long enough to remember downloading crap from newsgroups via a 14.4 modem or even slower. IIRC my first online experience was at 9.6 baud via an Amstrad 1640 DOS machine!

I'd just like to correct that if I may. These figures should be 14.4K bps and 9.6K bps and those were at the time considered fast! The MODEM designed for the BBC micro ran at 110 and 300 baud - I had one before I junked it. Even in 1993 communication with the ERS satellite from ESA was at 1.2K bps over X.25 protocol! I remember using the latest 14.4K bps MODEMs for ICI Fertilisers to provide rural remote access to HQ. At that time (1990?) theses MODEMs were priced at around £2K each but I haggled down a batch for ~£1500 each.

Where has the time gone?

DV

 

[miktec]

The first web-based forum I can remember accessing was sometime in the late 90s - possibly found via the clunky Alta Vista menu structure.
It was run by a company dealing in spare parts for the original Mini so there may have been a link on their website ....

Was a couple of years after that when I discovered what a firewall was (other than a car panel) and what it was for, by which time I had had my computer hacked at least twice

 

[Mike Reed]

I disagree. Either is acceptable according to both the OED and Merriam-Webster.
As someone who studied Latin, I find "forums" and "stadiums" clumsy and positively uncomfortable, but that's my problem.
I'll stick with"fora" and "stadia".

Of course, disagreement is the stuff of FORUMS !!!!. My New O.E.D. (sizeable tome) must be a lot more up to date/explanatory/believable than your O.E.D. and I think that Webster's may suit American English (but not sure about that).

From my New O.E.D., FORA is indeed the plural of market/meeting place whatever, but only for Roman ones. FORUMS, however, is the plural for internet meeting places, and the same for any venue/medium for exchange of ideas or views etc.

Conversely, to me, who didn't do Latin at school, FORA is symptomatic of margarine or at a tangential letter addition, plant life. FORUMS sounds fine.
Furthermore, STADIA sounds very odd to me, albeit being accurate as a plural of stadium, but STADIUMS is not only also correct, but is in much more common usage. Incidentally, STADIA was a Roman or Greek measure of length (presumably plural, upon which the stadium was originally based)

As a geographically interesting adjunct, which country boasts the nearest language to Latin? Answers on forums only !

 

[Darth Vader]

We have a chap at work who, many years ago (25?), ran up a £700+ phone bill using BB's to play some game or other. He needed help to resolve the problem.

Hmmm I used to run tests to mainframe services and used to play the text game 'adventurer'. If I remember correctly it ran in 128K bytes core memory in Fortran. I was amazed when the full game came out for the BBC micro and required just 32K bytes RAM! My modem at that time was 2.4Kbps. This was late '80s

DV

 

[miktec]

Earlier, I went back to college in 1990.

As students on a Humanities course we had very limited access to computers via the library - and then only for producing essays in text form for direct printing (via a long queue), don't recall any being linked to the 'net at all. Possibly by the time we left in 1993, by which time (or maybe slightly later) some of us had acquired dial-up modems.

The Business school had a suite of computers and we were given a one day course in IT skills in the 2nd or 3rd year, using their room - no mention of internet use - just the basic Office type stuff. Something to do with 'professional development'.

The first ISP I recall using about that time was Onyxnet - based in Newcastle and recommended by a fellow graduate.