"David Kaye" wrote in message
oups.com...
On Oct 2, 12:10 am, "Brenda Ann" wrote:

Sure there were. I was using web based forums at least as far back as
1983,
with my Commodore 64 and a 300 baud acoustic modem [....]

No, you're wrong. There was no Web in 1983. Usenet existed in 1983,
but the Web was not invented until 1990, and it was not practical
until Mosaic in 1992. I called attention specifically to the Web
because the growth of Web-based forums is the reason Usenet has fallen
into disuse.

Not this time cowboy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

"
The first TCP/IP-wide area network was made operational by January 1, 1983
when all hosts on the ARPANET were switched over from the older NCP
protocols to TCP/IP. In 1985, the United States' National Science Foundation
(NSF) commissioned the construction of a university 56 kilobit/second
network backbone using computers called "fuzzballs" by their inventor, David
Mills. The following year, NSF sponsored the development of a higher speed
1.5 megabit/second backbone that become the NSFNet. A key decision to use
the DARPA TCP/IP protocols was made by Dennis Jennings, then in charge of
the Supercomputer program at NSF."