My first internet posts were in 1990, to a World War II history forum on Compuserv asking for book suggestions about Nazi jets. I think I still have a printout of the conversation somewhere (I was nine years old).
I believe I posted occasionally to Compuserv's "flight sim" area in those early days... but the first community I really joined was their Wing Commander 'club' which was formed in 1993 just after Privateer came out. They put out semi-regular online fanzines for a while, which were word docs with collected stories and tips about the games. I think there were three or four of them and I'd love to dig them up again (I bet I have a floppy backup wasting away somewhere). You submitted your Privateer save to the guy moderating it and got added to the roster and I was very proud that I had the most kills. (I remember it felt like a BIG DEAL to stay connected to Compuserv long enough to download this 90kb file--they charged by time connected back then.)
Starting in late 1993 my father had pure internet access Johns Hopkins, where he was doing some sort of part-time graduate work (or teaching? I don't remember). The world wide web felt so *small* then, but it was just amazing in a way that nothing seems to be anymore. You would have to really work to get a connection and then pray it wouldn't disconnect and from there you could do anything.
I started reading the usenet around then and what really caught my eye was the Dune community, which just amazed my 13 year old self. Here were these graduate students and scientists and so on talking about my favorite book like it was a brilliant work of literature... I don't know if I ever actually posted, but I read everything on their newsgroup (almost twenty years later the same people are around and they're all enormous jerks, so... time makes fools of us all).
The first few Wing Commander websites appeared on the web in late 1994 and early 1995. The Wing Commander Aces Club was one of those college-restricted sites and it was almost never up... but when it was the fan fiction and the crude drawings of new fighters were so cool. There was the Terran Confederation Underground, which was HUGE. It was the first big Wing Commander site, probably still unsurpassed... it had stats for all the ships and it looked GREAT in 1995. There was 'The Jump Point' which was a site where Armada players submitted their bios... and then over the next few months some immitators.
Alt.games.wc3 and alt.games.wing-commander came into being around this time. I lurked at both from close to day one but wouldn't actually post there for a few years (using the usenet was becoming awkward around this time and we had one account for the family). There were also active Wing Commander clubs on AOL at the time with their own inane politics; I used my ten free hours to join, printed out a bunch of fanfiction to read and downloaded a beautiful rendering of a Rapier.
I was probably going to be a Wing Commander guy at this point, but I do remember flirting with some other communities. I posted to an X-Files message board run by FOX (to impress a girl at my high school, if you can figure that out) and was very fond of the Space Above and Beyond and Babylon 5 communities over the year (oddly, Star Wars and Star Trek were both huge to me and I don't remember ever getting into their online communities).
1995 was the big year that probably made me the Wingnut I am, though, for three reasons:
- Akkbar started "Introspection's Wing Commander Home Sector", the site that grew into WCNews.com. It was a Wing Commander 'news magazine' with an incredibly attractive layout (stolen from Blues News--but we were the first to do that, at least!) I was an uncredited writer for the site very early on and as Akkbar became more interested in making money online he brought on a 'staff' that included me, Chris and Bearcat.
- Origin opened a series of wwwboard forums at their website. You didn't need to register (I don't think anyone did anywhere at the time), you could just jump in and post about Wing Commander. There was very little moderation but aside from vehement arguments no one would think of doing anything to hurt the forum. I jumped in on day one, started a thread about the Ralari mission and Bandit (LOAF) was born. Bandit was my callsign, from my dog at the time.
I thought it was a great callsign but it didn't have much personality for an online community... so I added some form of (LOAF) after the name, usually as part of some sort of terrible joke (like 'Bandit (LOAFs You Very Much) or somesuch, each one was different).
(LOAF itself is LOAD spelled wrong from a high school BASIC programming class I was in. I kept making that typo and it somehow mutated into a bunch of simple gag programs where the computer would ask you LOAF? and depending on how you answered it'd display the word in flashing colors or flood the screen with LOAFs or something. Trying to figure out what it 'stands for' became a runner for the Wing Commander community for a decade.)
- Bearcat started #Wing-Commander, the Wing Commander IRC channel on the usenet and he invited me (from the message boards) and Eagle-1 (from the usenet) to run it with him. In 1995-6, IRC was a drug--there was always someone to talk about Wing commander or life or anything, Origin team members would drop in and be completely open about things... people were always fighting about something. It was AMAZING. Things fell apart over the years, but it was a huge part of my growing up. I wonder what became of Bearcat...
Wait, I forget where I was going with this.