Technology and computers and how good everything was in the old days

Mooney_Driver wrote:

I can honestly say that it was a great time of discovery and I would think there was a lot more quality over quantity. Those people who went through the trouble to get access and who also bothered to learn English and seek out the really good places had access to people and things which today are spread over a million fora over the net which nobody as time to read.

Aaah. Usenet. rec.aviation.

The radio side was mainly driven by the French but the mastermind behind the Network was a guy from the Nordics (Fin or Norwegian).

You may well be right, but anyway this goes even more to support the original point: not ALL technological innovation comes out of the US (or China).

I would never go back to Compu$erve or the model.

Of course there was [almost] no spam – because you had to pay by the minute to access it. There was no flat-rate system back then. ADSL delivered that.

The forums were quite tricky and had to be “used” in a specific way to get value out of them. This set them up for success and for their eventual failure.

On the plus side, most of the CS forums were US-based, which was great because they attracted broad communities, and there was a lot of expertise there. And speaking of US v. Europe differences, Americans tend to be more laid back and polite on forums than Europeans… and if Americans get nasty they tend to just be crude, whereas when Europeans get nasty they tend to get spiteful and vindictive in a close-up-and-personal and often childish way, and often in a cunning way to maximise the damage to the community. This is readily visible on European GA forums. Accordingly, the mod policy here on EuroGA (basically, not allowing people to “get personal”) was shaped by experiences of various online communities going back to 1990 and before.

On the minus side, on CS you had to be careful what you said and how you said it because the mods were often a bunch of weirdoes. This is what happens when you have unpaid mods on a commercial site – they tend to be people who self-select on personalities who want to throw others around, and they often go renegade. They have favourite posters who can do no wrong, and support cliques. And since CS set your username from your credit card account name, unless your name was John Smith you had zero anonymity, and zero privacy from e.g. your customers and other business and personal associates reading everything. There is a UK GA site which does this too (PPL/IR). The result was that nothing of controversy could be discussed unless you wanted hassle in your business.

There was definitely a difference between US participation and European participation in Usenet too.

On the “where does innovation come from” topic… it’s also worth mentioning that the whole web was invented by a Brit working in Geneva for a giant European bureaucracy (CERN).

And as for Minitel… happy days! In the early 90s I lived for a while with a view of long final into Nice airport, and when something flew by that I didn’t recognise a quick call to 3615 would tell me what it was. One day I saw an AF 747 going in, most unusual. I called AF at the airport and asked them what it was. “We don’t have any 747s here” they said. “Oh yes you do, take a look.” “Oh so we do, no idea what that’s doing here”.

First movers often don’t turn out to be the long term winners. I speak with painful experience as someone who spent a long time at DEC, who invented just about everything but didn’t stick around to see them make fortunes.

Peter wrote:

I would never go back to Compu$erve or the model.

In terms of quality and of the way communities were run I’d be back immediately. I even think that a forum provider which offers a completely ready structure for fora together with a framework where you can find fora on almost all subjects with similar platforms and a common offline reader could still be attractive, even though today of course graphics is everything.

Peter wrote:

Of course there was [almost] no spam – because you had to pay by the minute to access it. There was no flat-rate system back then.

That is why we had offline readers. First CIM, then Virtual Access or similar. You made a pass, had the whole content offline available, wrote your stuff and made another pass. The advantage to that was definitly that crossfire posts almost did not exist but also people took a lot more time to write their answers with corresponding quality.

There also were a lot less internet junkies who are online day and night and forget the world around them.

Peter wrote:

On the plus side, most of the CS forums were US-based, which was great because they attracted broad communities, and there was a lot of expertise there.

The reason was simple: There was only one forum for a specific subject, not 10’000. So the whole expertise was bundled there, simply because people had nowhere else to go. And obviously they tried their darn best not to be kicked out. Trolls were soon completely off the platform, which meant they were gone from the online world once they had annoyed both CSI and AOL authorities sufficiently.

It is in a way funny to see that similar mechanisms work today on some “forum platforms” like Facebook. Indeed, some of the old Compuserve Fora are trying their luck there. And consequences of being thrown off the platform are similar in that regard, however, it is much easier today to create a new alias and be back in a flash. Most however find out to their dismay that while they are offered an easy forum structure, the clientele there is very different.

Peter wrote:

On the minus side, on CS you had to be careful what you said and how you said it because the mods were often a bunch of weirdoes.

LOL, well, I’ll wear that hat with pride then . As a matter of fact, becoming a sysop (as we were called then) was considered quite an honour at the time and usually would not happen until you had proven yourself within a community for some years. Not only did you have to be nominated by the forum owners, you also had to be accepted by the lead wizops in that community, which was not an easy thing to achieve. On the other hand, responsibility was way higher than today and consequently lockouts were almost inexistent and always a huge thing if they did happen, particularly on platform level.

Today I would not touch moderating with a barge pole, in fact, even in the forum whose operator association I currently serve as president I do not moderate but leave that to people with better nerves. The reason is simple: Rule enforcement is basically impossible, lockouts are ineffective and trolls simply move to another forum to continue….

Peter wrote:

you had zero anonymity, and zero privacy from e.g. your customers and other business and personal associates reading everything.

Yes you had zero anonymity and therefore were much more careful what you said. Personally I find this an advantage. Anonymity is one reason why people think they can get away with almost everything on the internet today. My personal opinion of that is that if you can’t stand for what you write with your full name and face the consequences, then don’t write it. In most fora I write today I use my full name, unless it is totally uncommon to do so, like here or the other place where this one originated.

johnh wrote:

it’s also worth mentioning that the whole web was invented by a Brit working in Geneva for a giant European bureaucracy (CERN).

It is funny to think of what the original idea was and how much this was seen through a totally unrealistic pair of glasses… Mankind working together to provide information open to everyone. Bless his heart but the poor guy who came up with this idea must by now have realized that nothing can be further from the truth as to what this internet has evolved into. 90% junk, 10% content, the descent into a dark age of superstiton, fake news, VT’s and overbearing advertizing. Email today is useless to the point where most people abandon it. As always, if mankind is given “freedom” to use a mighty tool, they will ruin it in no time.

Sure, today it is no longer possible to do anything without the internet, but imho the approach it was set out from was totally misguided and it total disregard of human nature.

Peter wrote:

And speaking of US v. Europe differences, Americans tend to be more laid back and polite on forums than Europeans… and if Americans get nasty they tend to just be crude, whereas when Europeans get nasty they tend to get spiteful and vindictive in a close-up-and-personal and often childish way, and often in a cunning way to maximise the damage to the community.

I will take this quote outside the online service discussion because I think it points back into the original question in this thread

As much as this was and is true in the online world, the same thing has a lot to do with why the US i much more GA friendly than Europe is. Even though in recent years also in the US there have been very disturbing developments in the wrong direction too, with lots of airports being under threat, with people being unable to get insurance and with the current political climate tearing the country in two opposing fractions who at this point do not share much of the famous American Dream anymore. Still, the general American way of life favors the idea of General Aviation much more than the restricted, narrow minded and egoistic lifestyle in Europe or in many other parts of the world as well.

While we are often moaning about the European view to GA, we should not forget that GA is suppressed or prohibited in many parts of the world completely, it simply does not exist because the regimes in question do not want their population to think in terms of freedom but mainly as servants to the state who benignly grants them the right to live there and work for them. Yes the grass in the US is greener for parts of GA, by far not everything anymore, but there is a huge part of the world where there IS no grass for GA at all.

Malibuflyer wrote:

Sure – because it would have cost you fortune – and those select few that had the technical skills and required degree of nerdness to use that “computer” thing at all at those days typically did not have a fortune.

Sorry, that is total rubbish. If I remember right, Compuserve cost something like $9 a month. A normal online pass with Virtual Access or CIM took about 4-5 minutes on local or even toll free numbers (at least in Switzerland we had those and I seem to remember in Germany and Austria as well, I am certain that the UK had them and of course the US). Both CIM and VA were as easy or even easier to use as MS outlook.

I spend a LOT more money today for my Internet access than I did then.

Malibuflyer wrote:

Following this discussion, it is kind of interesting how easy it seems to be to fall in love with undemocratic and deeply unequal circumstances as long as one is on the right side of them!

Somehow I get the idea that you either never were part of these fora or if so were one of the very select who were banned, which at the time was something handled extremely restrictively for good reason. A complete ban from the network involved getting in touch with the Wizop level, something no sysop took lightly.

Malibuflyer wrote:

Sysops/moderators/community managers were more of an aristocracy than of a democracy.

Totally wrong again. The function of the sysops was to keep the rules enforced, which involved amongst other things no personal attacks, no swearing and keeping to the general guidelines. At least in the communities I was involved with, there were no restrictions on free speech or opinion, but there was an absolute no tolerance policy on personal attacks and, CSI imposed, certain vulgarity. In all the years I sysoped there, I am aware of 3 people who got banned from individual fora and ONE who got a complete ban from CSI.

I would think that the sysop function was one comparable of a mid level manager or quality controller, not some forum dictator. The administrators per se obviously depended on their personality, but that is a very different function and still the same today. If you have a narcistic idiot as a forum owner, then the forum will be very different than if you have someone who wishes to provide a service.

Malibuflyer wrote:

Yes, within the select group of the chosen that had the right combination of funds, nerdiness and foreign language skills (also not a given these days) it was a great world and a great experience. I would argue, however, that most of these difference was through (implicit) selection of the members of that circle.

CSI hat quite a number of German speaking forums too. I never bothered with any of them as I was busy enough with the others. AOL had a huge German speaking presence. Both ran quite a few fora in languages other than English. I remember French, Italian and Spanish for sure, never looked at many others.

I would argue rather than the selection of a circle of Iluminati, it was simply those who had computers and who were willing to learn how to use the new technology. The real difference was most probably rather in numbers than in elect circles. There was not that many of us then, the networks could not handled the quantity we have now, but those who were there were usually of a higher education, not because of economical reasons but because of skills.This however changed rapidly as the communities grew.

IMHO certainly CSI was MUCH closer to the original vision of the Internet as a sharing platform for knowledge and support than the Internet of today, which has in large parts degenerated into a spam, advertizing and fake news dominated moloch over which nobody really as any form of meaningful control. If you consider only the huge amounts spent on securing the networks from attacks, infiltration, denial of service and what not else, we are spending more money and effort to keep the net halfways usable, with the lamentable consequence that almost 90% of it is garbage with maybe 10% being the part of the net which is useful AND safe to use.

I personally think the old structures were much safer and easier to use and could have very well been developed into something which today could have been a safer and much easier way of communication and distribution of knowledge than the current system.

Mooney_Driver wrote:

I kept the account until they closed.

They didn’t. My account – quite surprisingly! – still works.

172driver wrote:

They didn’t. My account – quite surprisingly! – still works.

Really? CSI? I thought Compuserve was completely absorbed into AOL. I never went back to check as all the contents I used to access did move off CSI.

I just tried my account, it is no longer recognized. Apparently, in order to keep your account, you had to convert it to AOL, which I never did.