9 hours ago, Margaret Pilgrim said:
It was absolutely ground breaking! It began in the days when internet interaction depended on usenet, newsgroups. Yes, Virginia, there was a time before social media. I remember Buxbaum telling me, in the context of "rec.travel.europe", that this guy Shaw was going to start a forum about food and I should join. "What's a forum?" I asked him. "It's the next thing. Special interest forums will replace usenet." I couldn't comprehend this, but went along.
I have to laugh because I have tried to explain CompuServe, BMUG, GEnie, Prodigy, and even AOL which I used briefly and then spend weeks disengaging and eliminating all the little "hooks" it had inserted into my system.
We had a great recipe cache in SOAR (Searchable Online Archive of Recipes) that became www.recipesource.com and a bunch of us foodies, who have migrated from Prodigy to one I forget and then to Yahoo and now on FaceBook have maintained contact all those years.
And trying to explain the "speed" or lack of it is very difficult.
I can recall posting a question, going to fix a cup of coffee and a piece of toast and coming back to the little cursor symbol spinning around until there was a connection.