No message boards in 1996?

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2727Gopher

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I just saw an article on The Daily Gopher and it said:

Just think back to 1996, it wasn't all that long ago, and the search for Jim Wacker's replacement. There were no blogs, no message boards and certainly no twitter accounts. Most of us probably had limited (if any) acces to the internet.
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While I agree that internet access has exploded since then, twitter didn't exist and blogs were rare (I'm not sure if they had a name yet), there were message boards back then and we had a lot of lively discussion about the search to replace Wacker. Internet access wasn't as rare as you'd think - pretty much everyone I knew (other than my parents) were regular users back then (although, admittedly, most of them used dial-up service at the time). It was shortly after Wacker's firing and Mason's hiring that I first put together my Gopher information site. Time flies!
 

Technically blogs didn't exist then. You essentially had the same things, but no one called them blogs. Message boards have existed for decades on BBSes. The only thing is that because they used phone lines, typically only one person could use them at a time. What really changed when the Internet became available to people in the 1990's was that more people could access it. I can guarantee that people were discussing the Gophers coaching situation on BBSs in 1996. Can't prove it unless any BBSs were archived, of course. Message boards aren't new at all, it just got easier to access them and they got more sophisticated.
 

Jason started the GopherHole in 1996. I think Dave's football site that eventually merged with this site was formed in 1997.
 

Back in the days when people dialed in to BBSes to post messages, there were topics like "Thou shaly fireth Wacker forthwith!" (remember, it was a long, long time ago, so they spoke in old timey language) The very first BBS I dialed into was in 1990, the Pirate's Cove BBS in Miami, a SCUBA diving site. It had message boards for scuba diving. Other BBSes were specialty BBSes like this one, or they were general purpose BBSes, which had multiple message boards on various topics, sports included.

The very first time I got online was in 1981, we had access to a terminal on the PLATO network. I played a lot of games on the system, but also used the message boards a lot. Message boards weren't even new in 1981. They just didn't get as wide attention until the internet became available.
 

Not true

There were some very active message boards back then. One was a newsgroup, rec.sports.football.college, and the Big Ten website had something called Big Ten Fan Forums, I think. I can't remember what Rivals.com used to be called, but whatever it was that preceded Rivals came on around 1996.
 


I had forgotten about usenet. I didn't have much access to it when I was on the BBSes, some boards would have limited access to usenet, most had none.
 

That's right, the Gopher Hole started in the spring of 1996. We didn't have a message board until 1997, but the official U of M athletics site had a message board in 1996 (and possibly 1995)...until they realized that wasn't a good idea and should be left to unofficial sites.
 

We were broke in '96, don't even think we had a computer back then, much less access to the AOL intarwebs. It's a technicality, and for as long as MOST of us are concerned, the intarwebs and message boards didn't exist before '96. =)
 

I think I found Gopherhole in 97 or 98. I was working at the U of MN at the time and it was amazing to find a group of people that had the same passion I did. And to my surprise, I then found a High School Hockey MessageBoard. The internet is an amazing thing.
 



In Wisconsin the internet didn't start until '93. Anything prior that doesn't matter, as that is the official start of history.
 

Jason Groth said:
That's right, the Gopher Hole started in the spring of 1996. We didn't have a message board until 1997, but the official U of M athletics site had a message board in 1996 (and possibly 1995)...until they realized that wasn't a good idea and should be left to unofficial sites.
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The one on the official site was around for at least a year from what I remember. I was active on that board. I was also active on a national chatboard, although I was the only Gopher fan there. I remember everyone congratulating me after the big win over Syracuse in '96 - it made us 3-0! Six consecutive Big Ten losses after that sent Wacker packing.
 

USENET was much superior to these clunky web forum things - too bad the flood of SPAM killed it off for a while. I was amused to see that rec.sport.football.college is still going strong - ahhh, the memories...

Before the 'web' existed and before firing up my first newsreader I think I briefly accessed USENET with 'gopher', the UofM's precursor to web browsers.
 

Formo said:
We were broke in '96, don't even think we had a computer back then, much less access to the AOL intarwebs. It's a technicality, and for as long as MOST of us are concerned, the intarwebs and message boards didn't exist before '96. =)
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Should have been a physics major. We had internets galore way back in the 80's!
 




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