The Barnet
Many years ago in the early to mid nineties I had the good fortune to be a part of a network of bbs`s.
Every bbs I was involved with was a member of mail networks of one kind or another, two spring to mind, one was fidonet which was moderated pretty much the same as forums on the internet are moderated today by, for want of a better word, tossers, the other was the Barnet, pretty much started by a tosser and run and supported by other tossers,I was one of those tossers, however there was a major difference, genuine free speech was allowed, you actually had a right to express your own opinion, moderators pretty much let you say anything you liked and most moderation really was nothing more than starting threads if things were quite or moving threads around that were off topic but no one was denied the right to voice an opinion.
Those days are long gone now however the Darknet may be born again sometime soon particularly since every thing you do on the internets these days is monitored and policed and recorded one way or another.
Anyhoo I am going off of my own topic now so I`ll get to the point. I made a lot of friends back then that became a very large part of my life, I can remember the first thing I done every day when I got home from work was logging onto my miggy to see who had been on my bbs and to poll the mail, not just for my own mail but for my own users, it became a very happy little routine and even though I was tearing around London on a bike trying to stay alive all I could think of was my bbs and calls I had to make, people I had to see and mail I had to answer, those were great days and the internet was the reason for the destruction of the bbs and coupled I am sure with other factors, the loss of a lot of friendships.
In 99 I had a bad accident that shattered my pelvis and that put me in hospital for months, I was then in a wheelchair and had years of physio and rehab blah blah blah and ended up completely losing contact with all of my old friends, I had lost contact with most of them anyway as my 1.7 gig hard drive I bought from a Mr Morgan packed up and I lost everything, if anything else happened I have forgotten (I have forgotten a lot of things but I`ll get to that later) the accident was, I thought, the final nail in the coffin.
TBC