It was 24 years ago today

Twenty-four years ago, I opened Through the Looking Glass BBS to the world, thus starting my blogging career without knowing that I was a blogger. I would argue that BBSes were early forms of blogging. TTLG featured message boards of subjects that I liked, I chose, and on which I bestowed the favor of being able to post/comment or not. (In those days, we had public threads and private threads for the elites which, of course, we all thought we were.)

In those days, I was firmly on the left side of the fence, and argued incessantly with a reader whose handle was The Dumb Ox (but who was not dumb), my resident conservative. In those days, I realized that it was not accurate of me to say that abortion was merely getting rid of a bundle of cells. As you can see, I was and am willing to change my mind on certain things if a good argument is made.

I went online in the summer of 1986, so I’ve been on the internet longer than the Hipster generation has been around. (And my sarcasm beats theirs by several levels of magnitude, but that’s both upbringing, innate talent, and practice, practice, practice.)

The man who wrote my BBS software is now the editor of the Hugo-winning online magazine Clarkesworld. The man who was one of my most frequent BBSers as a teenager is now a big force in the online politics/journalism world. My, we had a talented crew back then, and while we realized it somewhat, it took a few decades to shake itself out.

So I’ve been online just about a quarter of a century, and I’m not close to tired of it yet. Yourish.com turns ten this spring. I think I’ll stick around a while longer.