I have been around long enough to have both seen, and participated in, the developing life of the Internet for some 25 years. Part of the legacy of this is that I now enjoy – if that’s the correct word – sharing my home with more outdated computer hardware than any sane person should. Another part is seeing the way the Net has now integrated into mainstream life at a level which I and my fellow geeks were predicting and advocating way back in the 1980s.

While now the mainstream media ‘historians’ of the Net focus on (and for the most part appear to celebrate) the spectacular and hungry progress of Facebook/Google-esque phenomena, I count myself fortunate to have experienced the idealism of an earlier incarnation, before the World Wide Web, back when we proudly, affectionately and unselfconsciously called it by the name coined by SF writer William Gibson: ‘Cyberspace’.

You see what is generally forgotten when Social Networking is celebrated as wondrously new-millenial is the fact that back in (or perhaps shortly before) the 1980s computer enthusiasts discovered how to hook-up their home computers to modems and put them online via the domestic phone network. The software they ran allowed other computer users to type public ‘posts’ in threaded discussions, to leave private messages to other users, and to share files. Sound familiar? These host computers were known as BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), and soon a programmer named Tom Jennings, developed the means for these BBSs to pass their discussion forums (Echoes) and e-mail around the planet via a network which he called ‘FidoNet’. Jennings’ lasting achievement is that FidoNet grew into a free international computer network developed and maintained by amateur enthusiasts and driven largely by simple hobbyist idealism. Yet the fact of this achievement – indeed the fact of the existence of the BBS phenomenon at all – is almost totally ignored by mainstream media commentators on the history of the Internet. more »