My first online post was in the 1980's, long before web browsers, on a mailing list called RISKS. I ended up meeting congressional staffers, Richard Stallman, and a host of other amazing characters as a result of posting on that list. I even had engineers at Fortune 500 companies track down my student office landline phone number and call me with questions about things I had posted. The net was a very different place back then.

RISKS was where anybody active in the emerging fields of computer security and the impact of computers on society met and exchanged ideas (the name RISKS came from risks of computers to society, and was moderated by a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute named Peter Neumann).

I'm sad for future historians of the Internet because it looks like the early days of the RISKS-FORUM Digest have been lost to network topology changes at Newcastle University and SRI. The earliest archives I could find just now went back to around 2000, but the heyday of the RISKS mailing list was actually back in the 1980's.

In the same (old) boat. I ran email and USENET over UUCP before I had IP access for Gopher. Such a long time ago. In my area Gopher was free for everyone with a modem because the local university did not authenticate dial-in connections.