"Brenda Ann" wrote in message

"David Kaye" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Oct 1, 8:47 am, (G) wrote:

On these newsgroups, I get the impression the young
people do not use, or do not like to use USENET.
Perhaps they are somewhere else. It was not like this10 to 15 years ago.
And, there is a
lot of frustrated old people around here.

10 to 15 years ago there weren't Web-based forums. In
fact, 15 years ago there wasn't a Web as we know it. Google Groups may
have been the salvation of Usenet.

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 (even the crude graphics of the era took
forever to load.

Usenet?

There were other networks of BBSs in those days.

There was no pracical, widely usable web in the 1980s.

This is typical of histories of the web:

http://www.w3.org/History.html

From it, the web seems to date back to the early 1990s, maybe 1992 or 1993.

The bad old days of CompuSlave et al
when net time was charged by the minute (about two
dollars IIRC).

Been there, done that.

Even then, the forums were very popular,
taking over the job that was mostly done by BBS's.

The trouble with local BBSs was the lack of traffic.

There were national and regional BBSs like ExecPC that addressed that
problem.