USENET is where I met Glenn Saunders for the first time. He was working, along with some others, on a special Atari VCS CD project, “Stella Has a New Brain”, and it was excellent. A quick e-mail later and I was on the list for the first 250 CD's to be produced, and when I finally got that CD it was like magic! Not only did I get something cool, really damn cool actually, but I got to know something about the people that produced it, and that was very special. I've got number 96 kept in the manila envelope I received it in. This remains my favorite artifact of that time.

USENET was filled with FAQ documents for all the classic systems too. You can find the Atari one, for example, by simply Googling for it. Back then, it was good form to post it regularly, offering an updated version as people sent in their tips.

We didn't have a Google! One had to learn the order of things to find stuff. Everything was machine and hierarchy specific. Some people would regularly post directions for the newbie's, and confused regulars, to find their way around. Now we can just Google and have it all in seconds, but I kind of miss the little signposts. It was a sign that people cared and that bit of culture was important to the overall feel of the net back then.

An example of how this worked is in order.

I was probably one of a few people in the world who had hacked their Zenith TV and had a Playstation. The power of USENET was such that others could post up their bad experiences, somebody like me could read them, and offer help. That's the gist of it right there. Today, of course, this is nothing. We do it all the time, expecting not only to get an answer, but to get one in a few minutes, or an hour, where it used to take days sometimes, or one would get no answer at all, desperately looking through FAQ documents and technical publications on-line hoping the answer to the riddle was there...somewhere.

The bad in all of this is unchanged from today. For a time, all my gaming stopped. I was totally absorbed in USENET, contributing things and reading things, and life was kind of good. It was as easy to get sucked in then as it is now. No change there at all.

Another great time was the major console releases! Before USENET, we all would read magazines hoping to get clues from the demo pictures and show stories. I'm sure every one of us dreamed of walking the CES show floor, to be there checking out the goods first! I know I did.

Well, USENET, and that rec.games.video branch was where it was at. Soon the SONY, Atari and 3DO groups were filled with people talking up their favorite systems, wondering how ID managed to do DOOM and WOLF3D, and all manner of conversation. The noise floor rose to a point where the people who managed the groups decided to incorporate an advocacy sub-group, and from then on, it was GAME ON! Welcome to the beginning of the never ending system wars! Back then, it was best form to get after it in advocacy, with people often calling for others mixing it up to, “take it to advocacy”. I think we could use more of that today, but that’s just me.

There was all the mudslinging you could imagine. The 3D0 fans were trying to claim that interpolated 640 pixel resolution was the same as Jaguar real 640 pixel resolution. Would the 3D0 survive the Saturn and the gorilla SONY Playstation? The Jaguar was declared dead, but then saw a glimmer of hope as Jeff Minter not only programmed some excellent games for it, but posted development notes along the way! I thought it funny too. As soon as he did this, others ended up claiming he was going about it all backward. Tempest 2000 rocked, so he had to be doing something right. Heh...rock on Jeff and don’t take too many trips into “Happy Fun Memory Land” (That might appear in a future column).

There were other things about this time that are worth remembering. Many companies had server machines and hackers were a minority. It was possible to go to a company server and FINGER somebody to get a glimpse at their .plan file. You see, the Internet started out a multi-user thing and that meant UNIX machines were the norm. There were shells, home directories and all sorts of cool things about them that helped people work and live together on-line.

How could I forget * PLONK! *? This is an awesome thing. Everybody who read the news on USENET used a news reader. One function of this was the .kill file where a username deposited there meant all their messages go straight to /dev/null, or the bit bucket, or empty space, however you see it. Once killed, they were simply gone! The * PLONK * was the expression that somebody just got a trip to the kill file. It ended up being used as a finishing taunt by the winner of a heated argument as well. Great stuff! The ignore user function on many web forums works in a similar way today.

The FINGER command was fun and informative. FINGER would read a users .plan file, and send it over the net to whoever did the fingering. I used to do Jonn Carmack, eagerly awaiting new QUAKE news, along with a ton of other people. Heck, that might be operating to this day...I used to chuckle seeing mentions of .plan in gaming magazines of the time, knowing it was just a few keystrokes away. Then again, a whole lot of people were not on-line yet, so this made sense. Still, it was cool to get the goods directly from the ID machine.

All of these experiences combined seriously changed gaming for me forever. What was once a spectator sport suddenly became something I could get involved in on a lot of levels. Anyone could, and that’s the beauty of it all right there.

Want to program something? Ask. Want to talk to somebody of interest? Catch them in a thread and ask away. Get some magic done? Post it up for the world to see and bask in the accolades, or grimace as it flops big!! Either way was fine, we soon-to-be retro gamers were connected, and the connections grew stronger each passing day.

Soon, that modem got too slow and things were advancing at a tremendous rate. One day a good friend of mine invited me to the University to check out this thing called a web browser. He had managed to secure time on a computer capable of running it, and had the download capability to bring down the program for his own use.

Http://www. became a part of my on-line lexicon that day. We literally were able to surf most of the net. In this early time, there were perhaps a thousand major pages and who knows how many simple home pages. After checking it all out through directories people had posted up for those of us wandering here and there, we called it a day, and I knew then I had to get an upgrade and quick.

Returning home to my simple modem and USENET was fun, but its days were numbered, and the cause of that was the World Wide Web.

To make a long story short, I managed to get a better computer running Windows 3.11 with the Winsock extensions, a nice fast 14.4 modem, a meager 5MB of RAM, and jumped on-line about 6 months later. I didn't even recognize the place....and that's the boom that expanded into the Internet we know and use every day.

These days, I will check in on USENET from time to time looking for old names, places, and things. Most of it is buried amidst SPAM and noise now, with a few die-hards getting after it still. Good on them. For me, it’s a lot like visiting what used to be a fine neighborhood and seeing it gone badly. There is a ping of regret in this and then I move on, happy to have our modern Instant Messengers, WWW, Twitter, Facebook, and other almost magic things by comparison. As good as it was then, I would say it's just as good now, only different.

There is one more thing to say. Early on, everybody who got on the net was mentored by somebody already on-line. There was a semi-serious culture where everybody knew it was a damn good thing and nobody wanted to spoil the party. Warnings of files being logged on FTP sites was something we took seriously. YELLING BY TYPING IN ALL CAPS was another. Truth is, a whole lot of people just KNEW that ordinary people didn't get stuff like this. Treat it with care and don't rock the boat to risk a darn good thing.

I learned these things, stubbing my toes here and there like everybody did, eventually getting along nicely after that.

Then things began to change...search “The Eternal September” for an idea of how. Another long story short, somebody got the bright idea to let the AOL users out onto the Internet Proper. I could write another book on this aspect of things, but let's just say there was the Internet pre and post-AOL. All of these these semi-connected communities had personalities. Some were elegant and respectful, like Bix or Compuserve. AOL was the seething masses, and when they hit, they hit big!!

THEY STUMBLED AROUND, YELLING, CLUELESS, MAKING NOISE, AND THERE WERE A LOT OF THEM, AND THEY CAME, AND CAME, AND CAME...

That's when the open nature of the net changed for good. Machines started shutting down, firewalls went up, gates erected for members only, not unlike gated communities are done today. There was no way to avoid that, so don't get me wrong, if you were an AOL user. Having people on the net meant more activity, commerce, and growth, so there was lots of good with the bad.

Despite all of that, I can't help but wonder whether or not we will ever again see the kind of time we saw at the beginning, before the web, when the hot scene was the thrift stores, auctions were done with text and e-mail, an honest trade could be brokered by two people, and you could send your package off with no worries as nobody wanted to be that person everybody else talked about! Try that today

So there you go. That's a glimpse into what I consider to be the golden age of on-line retro gaming. It was a great time and is where the roots of our real hobby started and grew into this global thing we know today. Thanks everyone. I mean it. Just thanks. Its been one hell of a ride since that first sneak peek at USENET while the boss wasn't looking, and there is a lot more to come. Of that I am sure.

If it were not for passionate people around the globe getting on-line to follow their dreams, or maybe just not give them up, we wouldn't have a retro scene like we do. I love it, always have loved it since that day I signed on to rec.games.video.classic and was hooked from the first word.

Have some memories of these times? Share them!