First blog in 1982?
Jim Howard writes (in the comments on my posting about Ben Hammersley’s light-hearted claim that Richard Steele wrote the first blog in 1709) that he (Jim) might be considered the first blogger. Jim writes:
in June of 1982 I setup Howard’s Notebook, a bulletin board system, and people could dial into my BBS. At first they had to connect at 300 baud.
I posted the sort of stuff you see here now.. information and comments and what was going on in my life. I posted the comments that people sent to me about the BBS and subjects of interest. I had “links” to other information on the BBS. Things like list of ham clubs, ham repeaters, satellites in space and stuff like that.. plus I had a list of other bulletin board systems.
Later I added more phone lines to the BBS. A bit later I got connected to the Internet. Remember this was still before the WWW. So people could send and receive Internet email and read and post to newsgroups. I had some Internet email addresses setup as links so that a person just had to click on the link and it would enter the email address. (Because people could not understand how to address an email at that time.) Also I did things like add a phone line so that a person could click on another BBS from the list and my computer would dial out and connect and then the person was on my BBS but connected to a BBS someplace else.
So I think I had everything in place to be a blog and I think that Howard’s Notebook was the first blog and it was June of 1982.
Was it a blog? It depends on the outcome of a really uninteresting argument about the definition of “blog” that I’d rather not have. Nevertheless, I thought I should note Jim’s claim for the record. (And where can I get a copy of The Record anyway?) [Tag: blogs]
