🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <52...@blake.acs.washington.edu>
fet...@blake.acs.washington.edu (David Fetrow) writes:
< So anyone met there wife/husband over a Bulletin Board System?

This has been around in an on-and-off way for two decades now!  The first
story I heard of a marriage that followed from people who met by computer
was back when I worked for Com-Share Inc. in 1972.  Com-Share was (and,
to the best of my knowledge still is) a time sharing service.  They had,
by 1972, a nationwide customer base served by a computer center in Ann Arbor
(packed full of machines).

When I worked on the Plato IV system at Illinois (1973-1980), there were
many stories of people who met on-line and then got married.  Plato had
something like 1000 terminals spread around the US, most all of them in
universities and mostly used for undergraduate instruction.  Plato had,
by 1974, an on-line newspaper called newsreport as well as the original
notesfile mechansim (a clone of this is now one of the standard newsreaders
available for usenet news service).  Both newsreport and the system notesfile
on Plato would qualify by todays standards as moderated newsgroups, and
the Plato's public notes would qualify as an unmoderated newsgroup.  Plato
offered E-mail as well, and the social consequences among the Plato
community were predictable.  People met that way, some of the meetings
were heterosexual, and some of those led to romance and marriage.

I assume that the early years of the ARPANET were similar, but I wasn't
involved with that community till the '80s.

In the field of computers, we forget our history quickly!

				Doug Jones
				jo...@herky.cs.uiowa.edu