[NTLUG:Discuss] OT: first news group post

[Lance Simmons]

* Rusty Haddock <rusty at fe2o3.lonestar.org> [040408 19:39]:
> 
> Keep going, kiddies... :-) 2 Dec 1984 

I've always wondered about this question, so let me just ask it.  I live
on the humanities side of a university, and it was only in the early
1990's that we started getting access to email and Usenet, whereas the
science people had had such access for years.  A real expansion of
Usenet (and the Internet) thus took place, as more and more people
started posting who (like me) were not primarily technically oriented.
I remember at the time that not all the techie people were thrilled
about this development, because the Internet had previously been their
own private domain.

A couple of years later, there was another expansion.  Services like
Prodigy and AOL started bringing to Usenet, and to the Internet more
generally, people with no technical knowledge and often not even the
rudiments of a decent education.  I remember being frustrated, and
thinking "who _are_ these people, and why won't they go away?"  As we
all know, they didn't go away, and Usenet became what it is today.  (The
Internet as a whole, however, seems to have fared OK.)

Here's the question:  you lived through both those waves of change.  Did
you experience them (at the time, I mean, not in retrospect) as being on
the same order of magnitude, or did you experience the second wave as
much more significant?

I'd like to think that the distinction between literate and illiterate
people is more fundamental than the distinction between science and
humanities people, and that the second change was thus much more
important in itself, but did you science people experience it that way
at the time?

-- 
Lance Simmons