LA Times List of Top Wine Sites

[russ parsons]

oh jeez, prodigy. i edited part of their food boards for a couple of years, like 89-90, something like that? what a goofy trip. my job was to line up "star chefs" and cookbook writers who would write brief columns and then answer questions. i remember one (michael roberts) wrote this really great thing about flavor and the first question he got back was a request for the recipe for bob's big boy fudge cake.

[MaxH]

Hi Brad, actually the wine newsgroup started early 1982 and you can find some of its archives easily. For example its first message is Here. (It changed names later.) Newsgroups are extensions of Internet email (which came in the 1970s); they diffuse messages to servers rather than keeping them in one place. Otherwise they're like current text-based fora (eGullet). Actually they're the basis for these fora, and of conventions like smileys and FAQs. Informed Internet histories such as Salus's (ISBN 0201876744) have many more details.

oh jeez, prodigy.

Yes that was one of the large private firms with fora for paid subscribers, separate from the Internet. Salus described that isolation when it was in the process of disappearing (1995).

i edited part of their food boards for a couple of years, like 89-90  . . . my job was to line up "star chefs" and cookbook writers who would write brief columns and then answer questions. ...

Sounds like eGullet!

-- M

[russ parsons]

i edited part of their food boards for a couple of years, like 89-90  . . . my job was to line up "star chefs" and cookbook writers who would write brief columns and then answer questions. ...

Sounds like eGullet!

-- M

←

actually, my hopes were that it might develop into something like the gullet, but apparently, there were too few foodies involved in the internet to make it happen at that time. i was also a member of an early food listserve called chefs and cooks on the internet, probably from about 1989 to the mid '90s. it was much more serious and much more fun ... trolls and all.

[MaxH]

my hopes were that [Prodigy food fora] might develop into something like the gullet, but apparently, there were too few foodies involved in the internet to make it happen at that time.

Yes, Internet user numbers have grown, along with applications, and public awareness. (It's remarkable that text-based fora like this one were very early online capabilities, preceding graphics, commerce, etc. Some early food-wine fora actually had considerable traffic, because there also were far fewer fora competing for the existing users.) Moreover, Prodigy fora cited above were still separate from the mainstream Internet. As late as the middle 1990s, Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie did not yet provide direct Internet access to their subscribers, and most restricted even email access. (The list server was Internet email.) Those early efforts at private proprietary online services, separate from each other and from the existing Internet, had the effect also of isolating their user communities for some years.

(Google's newsgroup archive has 1.2 million forum messages from the year 1990 for instance, and those don't even include the food and wine traffic, essentially, because such postings fell into a large "recreational" category that was excluded from a major archive for some years, storage space being limited.)

Edited May 17, 2006 by MaxH (log)