Man, I sure knew 35 years ago that whatever I shared in public was.... public. :)
And some of it still is public from way back then -- including dumb and ugly comments, stupid flamewars, teenager stuff, and phone numbers. It doesn't bother me.
I don't feel remorseful for having once been a kid and doing some of the dumb things that kids sometimes feel inclined to do, and those landline telephone numbers stopped being relevant to me decades ago.
Public or not 1991 was a very, very, very different time. The idea that some dumb stuff I posted would still be around in 30+ years would have been crazy.
(Actually, I wonder if the Prodigy forums got archived...)
Those were semi private no ? I would guess not. Although maybe there's an old server sitting in someone's garage with the info
I think this is the best we've got - but seems moribund. Relied on finding people's old C:\PRODIGY directories and finding what was cached
https://www.prodigyreloaded.com/
We're still working on it! It is worth noting that the STAGE.DAT an CACHE.DAT from C:\PRODIGY will never contain things like email messages or forum posts. They will contain things like the pages and program logic that comprise particular parts of the service, and at most parts of the various service database indices and records (e.g., bits of the Encyclopedia, Movie Reviews, that sort of thing).
There's a discord server for the project here: https://discord.gg/2GpsEC5JdP
35 years ago we didn’t have the cultural precedent/zeitgeist of getting cancelled for some stupid shit you wrote on a message board in 1991 so we were less guarded with our opinions.
Do we actually have a culture of cancelling people for the things they wrote when they were 12?
No, and we don't really have a culture of cancelling things for people they say now, either, when it comes down to it because if that were true, Trump would not be president given his long history of [waves hands], a large number of Republican politicians would also be out of work, etc.
So what is it that drives such phrases into common parlance as a description of the apparently-fictitious culture of rote cancellation, might one suppose?
I might suggest that "projection" is a primary motivator, although I work to avoid projecting on my own time.
(Edit: To disambiguate without vagueness: When some fucking party or other is talking about "cancel culture," they usually seem, to me, to be projecting about their own fucking party's fucking ugly policies and tactics.
And in a sane and pure world, I'd like to wish that they'd be recognized as being fucking scumbags for behaving in this way.
But it is my observation that we do not always live in a sane and pure world.)