Surprised that I don’t see more people talking about listservs. There was a time when email was cool. It wasn’t just regular mail, it was electronic mail. It was instantaneous. It was free postage. It was global.

Before the spammers and the scammers, email was the future of communication. Lots of random sites offered free email. No one was mining data. It was just a cool thing that you could basically already do if you set up a server anyway that didn’t really add cost. Low bandwidth meant no one was pumping out a crazy number of emails, and there was no video or audio to speak of online except in very niche uses.

So the listserv was born. A way to send and share information to your entire social network (before the term social media was even conceived). People would have years-long discussions, sometimes even threaded within the multiple layers of replies (before we knew what threaded meant). You would spend hours or even days composing witty, insightful, humorous replies before sending it out to the list. You would open your text-only email client each day with bated breath to see the latest news and group drama… and what new corners of the web people were exploring (it was already called the web - that’s practically ancient history). Hyperlinks were among the first pieces of complex formatting that people used regularly, although it was not unheard of to write out a URL by hand on a pad of paper and then manually type it into Netscape.

So websites were discovered and shared. Most people belonged to multiple listservs and so would share and reshare. Presto: dancing hamsters!