The Medway Handyman wrote:
As a relative newbie to this group, I was wondering, how did it all
start?
Who got it off the ground in the first place?

I understand it pre dates e- groups like Yahoo?

Just interested.

The start was ARPA Net (Advanced research Projects Agency Network) around
1969 that consisted of four universities that were 'linked' to form a
network (University of California - Santa Barbara, Stanford Research
Institute, University of Utah and the University of California - Los
Angeles) and started the basic fledgling FORUM group.

And yes, it pre-dates Yahoo by a long way *and* several operating systems -
even before Mark Andreessen's Mosaic OS (co-author) and the Netscape
Navigator that AOL have finally killed off.

This little nugget was taken from a college assignment that I did during a
two year full time BTEC college course that I undertook after taking early
retirement around that time - ah, the memories of a lecturer informing the
class that they could only use books and not the net to gather the
information (b*****d it was too at the time).

BRG