I must be older than you; when I got online, CompuServe(*) wasn't even a gleam in an MBA's eye. My gateway to the net - still not the Internet - was a modem and the UUCP protocol. Somewhere upstream was the backbone, which was still pretty close to being the ARPANET. My workplace - a small Canadian branch of a big German company - got online first. We all loved being able to communicate with researchers in e.g. Israel with only a day or so for the message to arrive. This was email, but there was also Usenet. I loved Usenet, and became increasingly sophisticated in my choice of client software. The best client was trn, which presented messages in threads, and allowed you to mark uninteresting threads to be ignored, as well as blocking specific annoying posters. IIRC, you could also use regular expressions to select what to ignore - or what to read. Like you, I also haunted parts of the comp.lang.* hierarchy, picking up expertise on sometimes extremely arcane details, though my language of choice was C, not Prolog. Later I acquired my own home system, with its own modem, and a place in the UUCP network. I downloaded and built various software packages. (It took days to download the complete source tarball for X11.) Time passed, and the Internet appeared, with nodes mostly connected at all times. the modems I used to connect to internet nodes got a lot faster. Eventually I got DSL, and joined the always-connected set. Meanwhile, Usenet got larger and larger, with an ever poorer signal to noise ratio. Most of the groups I frequented by that time were moderated - too many people were sending out too much spam to all the others. But what killed it for me was a policy decision by my then employer, that charged for headers downloaded - which trn had to do in order to reject an article. (No protocol was available for it to ask its server to send only articles matching a specific pattern.) My use of trn was causing a really large spike in the internal funny money charged to my department. I eventually got access to Usenet again via an ISP. But by then the bad had mostly driven out the good. However, the interface for trn was never an issue for me. What's not to like about an interface that does the job really well, which has stayed the same long enough for me to become an expert user? Even another equally effective interface wouldn't be as good while I was learning it. FWIW, I still judge interfaces to forums of all kinds by the trn standard. So far, none I've encountered have the same flexibility and power. (*) Actually, Wikipedia claims that CompuServe "dominated the industry during the 1980s" and was founded in 1969. I got online in 1985 or 1986. So this claim is totally wrong, even though I doubt I'd ever heard of it in the '80s.