Macrobius
Megaphoron
Via the Tunis Ghey Bar: https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?threads/e-texts-and-e-zines-of-the-80s-and-90s.2143/
This thread will give some sources to older online culture and its early roots in textual media.
Think of this as the Tunis equivalent of the Foxfire Books... creepy old men playing banjos, squealing like pigs, sonny, and speaking in archaic Appalachian dialeckt.
The 'World Wide Web' didn't spring out of nowhere. The www client itself (Tim Berners-Lee) 'bootstrapped' off of a set of protocols, some of which are still with us, some not. The six original ones I remember are 'ftp://' 'telnet://' 'gopher://' 'http://' 'news://' (of course) 'wais://' -- an obscure 'search' protocol by apple that doesn't seem to have taken off. Not sure if 'mailto:' counts as a protocol in this sense, but there was email too.
This is pretty much how things stood at the dawn of the Eternal September (of 1993) ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September ... but that was very late on, in the Ethnogenesis of the 'Net. (Teh Interwebs to Millennials, and that grandpa shit to Zoomers and Alphas -- don't get him drunk on T-day or he'll start talking about 2600 Magazine and his days in the '411s')
So pretty much as soon as people could 'buy computers' (Normies did this at a place called 'Radio Shack' and the tech in crowd just bot whatever to have fun at home like they did at work)
... and those computers could 'use modems' ... they started doing what primates will do, and hoot at one another. This was the 'BBS' era, where someone would stand up a home computer on a phone line -- maybe only at certain times -- and let their friends use dial up to leave messages.
BBS culture evolved (in the 80s) into Unix-to-Unix copy (UUCP) in a very specific subculture called Usenet, which was eventually a company as well. The 'Network News' (NNTP protocol) was a thing, and the news:// URL still works in certain contexts. It was largely superseded by RSS protocols later on. TBC (and XF2 forums in general) still use that, and you can find the relics here: https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?forums/-/index.rss [ to learn what RSS feeds a forum offers, go to the home page, hit CTRL-U for source code, and CTRL-F to search for 'RSS' ... in a typical browser)
Gnowing the history of RSS is more an Aughties thing, and how Google killed both Usenet (by subsuming the news:// archives as training material) and also by first promoting then killing 'RSS feeds' (ending the aughties 'weblogs of war' or as we called them 'blogs and now BLOGS which no one remembers why). Fuck you, BLOGSPOT.
Phora: https://www.thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?forums/-/index.rssj
Whitespace: https://whigdev.com/white/index.php?forums/-/index.rss
So this brings the story to the onset of the 1990s... have an archive:
This is what a typical post-BBS archive of 'e-texts' looked like, in the early 1990s
My own contribution is in 'estyle.txt'.
Go wolverines.
This thread will give some sources to older online culture and its early roots in textual media.
Think of this as the Tunis equivalent of the Foxfire Books... creepy old men playing banjos, squealing like pigs, sonny, and speaking in archaic Appalachian dialeckt.
The 'World Wide Web' didn't spring out of nowhere. The www client itself (Tim Berners-Lee) 'bootstrapped' off of a set of protocols, some of which are still with us, some not. The six original ones I remember are 'ftp://' 'telnet://' 'gopher://' 'http://' 'news://' (of course) 'wais://' -- an obscure 'search' protocol by apple that doesn't seem to have taken off. Not sure if 'mailto:' counts as a protocol in this sense, but there was email too.
This is pretty much how things stood at the dawn of the Eternal September (of 1993) ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September ... but that was very late on, in the Ethnogenesis of the 'Net. (Teh Interwebs to Millennials, and that grandpa shit to Zoomers and Alphas -- don't get him drunk on T-day or he'll start talking about 2600 Magazine and his days in the '411s')
So pretty much as soon as people could 'buy computers' (Normies did this at a place called 'Radio Shack' and the tech in crowd just bot whatever to have fun at home like they did at work)
... and those computers could 'use modems' ... they started doing what primates will do, and hoot at one another. This was the 'BBS' era, where someone would stand up a home computer on a phone line -- maybe only at certain times -- and let their friends use dial up to leave messages.
BBS culture evolved (in the 80s) into Unix-to-Unix copy (UUCP) in a very specific subculture called Usenet, which was eventually a company as well. The 'Network News' (NNTP protocol) was a thing, and the news:// URL still works in certain contexts. It was largely superseded by RSS protocols later on. TBC (and XF2 forums in general) still use that, and you can find the relics here: https://tunisbayclub.com/index.php?forums/-/index.rss [ to learn what RSS feeds a forum offers, go to the home page, hit CTRL-U for source code, and CTRL-F to search for 'RSS' ... in a typical browser)
Gnowing the history of RSS is more an Aughties thing, and how Google killed both Usenet (by subsuming the news:// archives as training material) and also by first promoting then killing 'RSS feeds' (ending the aughties 'weblogs of war' or as we called them 'blogs and now BLOGS which no one remembers why). Fuck you, BLOGSPOT.
Phora: https://www.thephora.net/phoranova/index.php?forums/-/index.rssj
Whitespace: https://whigdev.com/white/index.php?forums/-/index.rss
So this brings the story to the onset of the 1990s... have an archive:
This is what a typical post-BBS archive of 'e-texts' looked like, in the early 1990s
My own contribution is in 'estyle.txt'.
Go wolverines.
