Okay, folks have now made billions of dollars based on the same essential premise on which POPnet was formed. People like to talk with people over the computer, because people are fairly gregarious creatures. But it seems to me that I still feel it necessary to couch the origin of my best friendships (none of which, save two, pre-date POPnet) in terms of vague, non-specific references to "high school friends" or some such.

As the emergence of the internet liberated you to explain how you met your POPnet friends or, like me, are you unable to overcome that mid-80s stigma, even now, on the dawn of the third millenium?

-- Andrew Lloyd (gnaak@yahoo.com), August 10, 1999

Answers

Well, after college and work and all that, I have a good number of friends that didn't come from POPnet. But for a while, nearly all of my friends came directly or indirectly from POPnet or BBS's, and a good number of them are still about. Before that, I think I could count them on one hand.

I don't have any problem talking about how I met friends on local computer systems in the late 80's/early 90's, even though there are dozens of technical computer professionals who don't even know what a BBS is. ("okay, imagine the Internet, like you can chat, email, share messages etc, right? now imagine it's about a billion times simpler and runs on one computer with a few phone lines, and mostly just local people call in, okay?")

Of course, I was never too worried about "the stigma". I was happy to have friends in the first place, and plus *my* friends knew how to use computers! :) In fact I realized one day in 1992 or so that 90 percent of everyone I knew was either a BBSer or had been introduced to me by one. I proceeded to brag about this to the other 10 percent.

-- Ivan Cooper (stingray@2xtreme.net), October 11, 1999.