I first hooked up with online MSTies in 1993 via dialup to a local BBS wherein I got my first email address, and my first access to Usenet – they only carried a small handful of newsgroups, of which alt.tv.mst3k was one. The BBS had a limit of 60 messages a day per newsgroup… and for a while, that was actually enough to keep up. Then came the promotion to a Big 7 group, rec.arts.tv.mst3k, which was eventually split into rec.arts.tv.mst3k.announce (for official announcements) rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc (for anything and everything else).
Oh hey, and here’s an archive of the RATMM FAQ… nostalgia ahoy!
You know, I’m fairly certain that the RATMM was the very first FAQ I ever read.
I specifically remember reading it on my trusty 486DX around '94 or '95…
I was never very vocal on Usenet – too shy – but I did lurk like crazy!
Just plain shout-out for that! Yeah, I dialed-in to my middle/high-schools VAX/VMS system in the early 1990s, but I wasn’t cool enough to know about MST3K at the time. Mostly trading “illciit” materials that is tame by today’s standards.
I did almost get expelled for reading girls’ e-mails with a rudimentary trojan horse, using the VAX/VMS scripting language,though. And, yes, they were indeed “girls,” as in about my age.
Not exactly a “veteran” because I wasn’t known to post there or anything, but yeah, it was one of the newsgroups I visited in the 90s. (Ahh, the days when ISPs offered nntp servers as a matter of course…)
I actually still have a shell account (I know, the sign of a true geezer) and r.a.t.m.m is in my newsgroups list, but it rarely has any posts nowadays.