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How...

I believe my mom may have been on the internet in 1969 or more likely the early 70's.


Edit - must have been the 70's since the first four nodes didn't start until Dec 69.
 
No omg lol. I can't upload a picture, but if you go to off topic and go to the very last page, you will see. Where it says 1 . 2 and then shows like 3000 something. Click the last one.
 
This forum was started back in the dark ages before the common internet, somewhere in the mid 1900's. You needed a phone and acoustic modem to connect directly to the server. This is before electricity was even invented, so you had to hand crank the computer to keep it running - it was all mechanical, even vacuum tubes were considered science fiction back then.

At some point when electronic computers came out a member here created a device to convert the posts from the mechanical format to digital. I believe they used a form of slate punch cards. If you notice in those old threads the first post is often missing. That's because when running a batch it would take a while for the fly wheel to get up to speed and it would miss some of the data.

The invention of the vacuum tube changed a lot. Until about a year ago the forum was still running on a vacuum tube based computer. It went down every night so they can change the blown ones.
 
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