Dead

I used to connect to Usenet through TELNET from the University of Alberta to Cleveland Freenet. In thosedays, you could access the TELNET outside the VM login so you weren't even registered on the University mainframe.

I first experienced an online community in September 1987 when I was introduced to Relay, a VM-based chat running simultaneously on a number of university mainframes and using NetNorth-Bitnet-EARN connections to carry on interactive communications. The program of choice (which had to be on the mainframe) was XYZZY.

I met my wife when she was at the University of Alberta and I was at the University of Ottawa (a distance of at least 3000 km) and she called for a relay operator (I had joined that elite crowd by then) for buttistance with a user whom she found rude. Following up with her the next day by e-mail, we began an increasingly detailed correspondence which led to my going out to Alberta for two weeks at the end of the following April, and returning in June with my daughter for our vacation. We have been together since (almost 18 years).

--

"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."

Dom Helder Camara