Bulletin Board System/Usenet…

by jenjenk on August 31, 2009

I was seriously contemplating whether or not to post this.  I didn’t want everyone to know that I was actually older than I behaved.  But then I remembered that I was only 10 years old when I wrote this.  Yes, a 10 year old with access to a think tank University research department that helped develop the WWW to what it is today. Riiiight.  [it WAS an after school job, by the way!!!]

 
I admit it…every so often, I get curious to see where I exist on the interweb so I google myself. Imagine my surprise when I saw THIS post from nearly 19 years ago. NINETEEN YEARS AGO. Do you realize that the WWW didn’t even exist then? Everyone at our company used to refer to this the “bulletin board” [or the “newsgroups” since that’s the feature most of us played on during work hours]. People would post their questions, comments, recipes, travel suggestions, and scientific research [i tend to forget that information exchange was the original purpose of Usenet/BBS], etc on a variety of different subjects.

  

After having found my post, these are the conclusions that I came up with:

  1. I still write exactly the same as I did when I was 11…I mean 10, as I do now.
  2. What you write now will be on the internet for at LEAST the next 20 years, if not longer.  The moral of this story, boys and girls, is that you need to beware of what you write because it can haunt you the rest of your life.
  3. My big contribution, my participation in the building of the world wide web as we know it today was a call for “authentic” tamales recipe.  As opposed to faker, poser tamales.*
  4. If I had actually understood what was going there, I could’ve registered domain names through the place where I worked.  Thus leading to my instant millionaire lifestyle.  But let’s face it, I was dumb.  I had no clue.  Not much has changed since those days.  

Incidentally, in case you were wondering – I got the “authentic” recipe, made it one time before I realized it was a huge pain in my butt to make and never attempted it ever again.

 

Here’s hoping that no one ever finds my post requesting travel suggestions to Mexico.  Extremely irresponsible for a 10 year old to travel to Mexico with a group of friends her same age on their own without any adult supervision, don’t you think?

 
* to be fair, the groups weren’t nearly as developed as they are today.  Most of the tamale recipes out there were for tamale pie. Funny how i remember that from 19 years ago and can’t remember what I had for breakfast today.
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

Culinary Vixen August 31, 2009 at 2:55 pm

Love it Jen! You KNOW I remember. You were that YOUNG? Weren't you in on those beautiful wedding dresss designs recreated in paper? You library ladies were the bomb! I always wanted to hang out with you, but the PhDs didn't like that… had to keep me slaving on their numbers.
I wonder what my oldest posting is… hmmmm????

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Jen August 31, 2009 at 3:35 pm

OMG…that's right…Shirley needed a wedding dress model so I had to stand still and wait until she put that thing together on me. yeah…we were super productive in those days. oddly enough, i was actually at ISI more than I was at school! 🙂

you need to go search it out! I'll bet you've got stuff up there, too! 🙂

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SinoSoul September 2, 2009 at 7:45 pm

wow. I first logged onto IRC in '93. Thank god there are new archives of all that was on EFnet. "authentic" tamales are a lot easier now, since one can buy masa basically anywhere in LA.

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Jen September 3, 2009 at 2:34 am

Very good point!

See another term I haven't heard in forever – IRC! took me a second to remember what it stood for! 🙁

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