A 30-Year-Old Message

I mentioned earlier this week that growing up, I was lucky to have access to the Internet before the web. This meant I was able to take full advantage when I figured out how to use my dad’s dial-up account at Vanderbilt University during Christmas break in early January 1995.

Being a kid, one of my first instincts was to find a game to play online. With web search engines still rudimentary back then, I turned to Usenet, which I had been using for a few years. I posted a message to comp.sys.mac.games to help me find a game I could play over TCP/IP. For the sake of posterity, I posted the full message here. A less detailed version is also available on the Usenet Archives.

The sole reply to my message was polite and pointed me toward Bolo, a game I’ve played now for more than 30 years, from classic MacOS all the way to Linux and Windows 10. So the message clearly worked.

Two small notes on continuity:

• I first archived this message 15 years ago, on Friday, June 11, 2010, at 21:45:54, when I was living in Lausanne, Switzerland. As much time has passed since I archived the message as had passed between its original posting and when I archived it.
• The host machine I used to send that message three decades ago, ctrvx1.vanderbilt.edu (Vanderbilt’s Central VAX), directly inspired my domain choice for my alternate fediverse instance: ctrvx.net.

Even on the Internet, time passes quickly!