An earlier post and a followup conversation has prompted me to look a bit further into what aviation information has been lost from the online world. There were a number of dedicated BBS devoted to aviation in general, these were more popular in the USA but there were a number in the UK and Europe.
With the advent of USENET and some of the other services like Compuserve, the BBS slowly fell out of favour. The bulk of the information on the BBS servers has gone, few were backed up to anywhere accessible and many were just turned off and forgotten about.
So how serious a loss is this? To put things in perspective, I started using BBS services in the late 70’s and there was a wealth of information and knowledge on these services – although sometimes not easy to find.
The people who contributed to the knowledge base, they were people who had actually been there in a number of cases and they were pretty passionate about the information that they held. But few of the BBS services were moved to services like USENET, although some people did cross post.
There were BBS servers with very specific groups, covering subjects as diverse as US fighter aircraft in Europe. All the way up to current (well current until the advent of the internet) aviation activities, the community was very helpful and many people were members of multiple services.
Sorry to say I think that much of the information and many of the people are now and forever lost in the mists of time.