
The Crankiest Group in Cyberspace - TheSpiceIsLife
https://www.echonyc.com/about/
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sbilstein
Found a write-up from 2017 in The Atlantic:

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/echo-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/05/echo-
growing-old-online/524577/)

> In the intervening decades, Echo has never changed its primitive interface.
> To navigate within it, you can’t just click on links, but have to type in
> Echo-specific commands: j cen; l a m; sh 123. You don’t access it in your
> browser, but through a telnet client, a program that allows you to access
> the command line interface of another computer. It doesn’t support images or
> sound, much less video. It doesn’t even have colors. It’s text-only, and
> even editing text is a time-consuming pain in the ass.

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ArekDymalski
>"The conversations on Echo are not on the web (yet). Once you have a userid
(also called a login id) and a password, you must either dial us up directly,
or telnet to us from anywhere in the world on the internet. When you open an
account, we'll send you instructions in the mail (postal mail). This will take
a couple of days."

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floatingatoll
Oh, this is lovely. It’s what we had before Dejanews and Altavista and Google
came along and indexed everyone for free-text search. You could have
conversations and reasonably expect that only people looking up the _forum
topic_ would then be able to see the conversations you’d had. This is dreamy.

I hope they never allow web (Google etc) search indexing of any kind, it would
destroy them utterly.

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masonic
I thought _we_ were the crankiest group in cyberspace.

Anyway, how NYC-centric is it?

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B1FF_PSUVM
> Copyright 1998-2001,

Sounds like an alt.flame offshoot going back to BBS tech

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jeffrallen
A fish, a gun, and a smoking barrel.

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okareaman
I miss suck.com

~~~
jeffrallen
A fish, a gun, and a smoking barrel.

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dajohnson89
is there a remotely compelling reason for me to trust them with my physical
address?

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nimih
if only there was some way to receive mail without providing your physical
address. perhaps some sort of numbered "box" at the post office that could
receive mail for you to retrieve at your convenience.

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msla
Will the postal services deliver to _just_ a PO Box number, or do they require
a name? Because giving out a name can be rather threatening, especially if you
live in a small town or there's someone in the group that's near you.

~~~
masonic
Technically, name must match a name on the account.

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taneq
Wait, the crankiest group in Cyberspace isn't Star Wars fans?

