From the title I was guessing "Experts Exchange." Does anyone remember that?
Yes! I actually found some answers there back in the day.
The trick was to scroll down all the way to the bottom to see them.
A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#22From the title I was guessing "Experts Exchange." Does anyone remember that?
Do you remember when they changed the domain from "expertsexchange.com" to "experts-exchange.com"?
I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader why. :)
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was my guess without even looking. Forum software did not exist in the early 90s.
That's not true. It was just bespoke. The first general-purpose "forum" software was mid-90s per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum but initial one-off implementations grew out of the BBS scene that goes back to the 70s and 80s. They were pretty universally crappy, and just north of "guest book" comment lists, but they did exist. That said, enough of the early stuff in here mentions newsgroup that it was at…
> By 2000, though, Usenet was essentially dead for actual communication use
The groups I frequented were active through 2013 or so (and I didn't start posting on usenet until 1999).
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#24Each sub forum seems to have died suddenly at some date, different for each one. What's going on here? It's like the scene in a book where they're going through the remains of some dead civilization and saying "food still on the table, doors open... Whatever happened here, it happened suddenly."
I guess with this revealed as being fake, the solution is: each "subforum" is really the copy of a different newsgroup, and each copy was covering a different time range.
Figures. What a disappointing mystery.
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#25From the title I was guessing "Experts Exchange." Does anyone remember that?
Do you remember when they changed the domain from "expertsexchange.com" to "experts-exchange.com"? I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader why. :)
I guess the opposite is the case with "therapist.com" ;) (though both possibilities have different DNS A records).
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#26From the title I was guessing "Experts Exchange." Does anyone remember that?
I remember the only reason I installed the GreaseMonkey plugin on Firefox was to have a script that would scrub ExpertsExchange from Google search results. Prior to StackOverflow, it had incredible SEO for tech questions.
Opportunities seem so obvious in retrospect :)
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#27Ahh, some thing never change [1]. 1: https://i.imgur.com/Kc5xPLG.png
I was really hoping it was going to be posts saying C or Java were dead. Alas, it was regex.
I can give you something close to that. In a thread from 1995[1] some users were skeptical and not buying the C++ hype:
> A typical programmer uses FORTRAN, COBOL, C or if they believe the hype, C++. Typical programmers don't use functional languages.
From quite a few posts I saw I gathered that a lot of people thought C++ was not going to gain any real adoption, and an OO C was stupid. Which, looking at it from today’s point of view is hilarious. Makes you wander what new thing we’ll all think is just a trend but will become ubiquitous in 20 years.
[1] http://computer-programming-forum.com/23-functional/b8bd46e4...
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#28From the title I was guessing "Experts Exchange." Does anyone remember that?
That one has only faded into obscurity in the last 5 years or so. I remember specifically searching for programming related content on Google as late as 2012-2013 and getting Experts Exchange results. I search every single day now for programming related content though and haven't seen an Experts Exchange result in at least the last 3-4 years.
Happily — and for all of its faults — StackOverflow has killed EE in Google results. (Launched in 2008.)
Re: A dead programming forum with posts dating back to the early 90s
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not true. It was just bespoke. The first general-purpose "forum" software was mid-90s per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_forum but initial one-off implementations grew out of the BBS scene that goes back to the 70s and 80s. They were pretty universally crappy, and just north of "guest book" comment lists, but they did exist. That said, enough of the early stuff in here mentions newsgroup that it was at…
> By 2000, though, Usenet was essentially dead for actual communication use The groups I frequented were active through 2013 or so (and I didn't start posting on usenet until 1999).
I'm impressed, TBH. The bottom really dropped out of Usenet when it started getting used as a file transfer mechanism, and most conversational traffic moved away from it.