Well, there's a blast from the past

[julesjones]

Logged into my pro website for the first time in months, and lo and behold there in the most recent "visitor came from" stats was my entry in the Miss Snark Crapometer. I loved that site, I did; and it's been 12 years since she shuttered the site and left so many of us sad and forlorn.

I've had a couple of other "how long?" experiences today with looking up various things related to both fan and pro writing careers. It's been 16 years since I was first published by Loose Id. It's 21 years since I published my first fanzine. I feel old now...

Comments

[hrj]

The online world is one of those things where I simultaneously feel like life has always been this way and yet it's easy to remember the Before Times. It's been 14 years since I set up my first website...and 3 years since I added any new content to that one. (All my current activity is on my author website.) It's been 10 years since I left Usenet for good (when I finally gave up on rec.arts.sf.composition) and yet that era still feels like the most formative part of my online existence. I'd have to spend a bit more time than it's worth on Google to work out when I first started participating in Usenet. So many comings and goings.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I think I found Usenet in around 1996 when I started getting online via the ISP Demon rather than the Open University.

But my own "Goodness can it really be almost 10 years?" moment came a couple of days ago when I picked up my ukulele and tuned it and went to save a song I want to learn as a Word document. The last time I did that was 2010.

[julesjones]

Back in the days when we both had Demon Tenner A Month accounts. (Actually, I've still got mine, since I keep not having the spoons to track down everything that still uses it as the account address and change the registered address over.)

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I thought they'd abandoned the Demon emails? It took me several days to go through all the accounts which used it as a login and change it to my new email address. Even so I missed a couple, including my Demon internet account! Hence we ended up still paying Demon for a few months after we'd changed to a new Vodafone package.

Because Vodafone took over Demon and our bills had been paid to Vodafone for some years, we assumed (wrongly as it turned out) that one part of the company knew what the other part was doing.

[jacey]

Ah, yes, good old Demon. We stuck with them for 17 years until - after several takeovers - they introduced a spam filter that kept deleting non-spam emails. I must have found Usenet about the same time as Helen did... and I'm still in touch with (and face-to-face friends with) some of the writers I met on usenet, both misc.writing and r.a.sf.c.

[julesjones]

I got online and went straight to alt.fan.pratchett in early 1997. I didn't find rasfc for a couple of years after that, but those two groups plus some mainly Blakes' 7 related mailing lists were the foundations of my life online. As mentioned during that Twitter discussion a couple of weeks back, the majority of the individuals I follow on Twitter are people I know from the Before Times.

[jacey]

I remember r.a.sf.c being launched, so I must have been there slightly before you. It was brilliant in its day!