Robin Garr wrote:
Interesting perspective, Mark. From the standpoint of the general public outside the university computer-geek communities, "The Internet" didn't even come to public attention until the early 1990s, by which time CompuServe and its imitator Prodigy were major and growing services and AOL was just rising. Certainly these online services - which were considerably more than BBS if only because of their international scope - were the way that most people outside the computer-jock community first encountered online discussions and data access in any accessible form.
I agree completely, Robin, but I have a bit of a pet peeve about people conflating the Internet with the Web with BBSs, etc. It's of no real consequence to most people, but I feel compelled from time to time to remind folks of the distinction.
From the standpoint of those of us who'd been with CompuServe since 1985, the Internet was an intriguing but relatively arcane area that didn't seem to be of much use. I found alt.food.wine around 1991 or 1992, and it didn't take long to examine it and dismiss it; by that time it was already dominated by collegiate flamers, soon followed by spammers, and didn't really seem to have much to offer.
One small correction: alt.food.wine didn't exist until July of '94, the result of an impetuous decision to move wine traffic from rec.food.drink to a new newsgroup, so you either were looking at rfd or it was later than you recall. As someone who's contributed to alt.food.wine since '99, I can tell you that, for an unmoderated forum, it's remarkably free of flames and spam and been a very congenial and informative place to discuss wine.
Once they came up with that Mosaic thingie, though, the landscape changed very fast, and I'm just glad I had enough sense to figure that out while most of the people on CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL were <i>still</i> dismissing the Internet and the WWW (which, curiously, were seen as different things) as a useless toy that would never go anyplace.
Yes, from my perspective as someone who's been continuously networked since '76, the Web has done much to popularize and democratize the Internet and I don't regret it at all (despite the precipitous decline of online etiquette as our quiet little playground was overrun with the unwashed masses
). I even relented in '98 and finally bought a home computer after having relied on work machines for well-nigh 20 years. Now, it's an indispensible part of our lives, as it for so many others.
As far as wine newsgroups on Usenet go, though, I had no idea it pre-dated the commercial services, but I can't say that it's ever been a major public presence, then or now.
Agreed. Newgroup traffic is but a small fraction of that on web fora, but we should be careful not to equate volume of traffic with quality of discussion, right?
One special attribute of newsgroups is the readers' ability to maintain archives of past posts, something that might prove difficult with this and other Web-based fora. Since Google currently maintains a newsgroup archive, we can use it to find e.g.
JBL's favorite wines from the '96 Sonoma Harvest Fair or one source of
Robert Callahan's animus toward RMP, including commentary by several figures quite familiar in these parts.
Anyway, I in no way sought to diminish either the signifcance of your role or that of WLDG in bringing intelligent discussion of wine to the Internet. For many of us here, the more places there are where this sort of discussion can be found, the better, and I salute you for all that you've done to further that cause, Robin.
Cheers!
Mark Lipton
) Let's get over this crap and throw some molotov cocktails. Can we talk about terrior or natural corks or something? 
