21st Century Poetry: Poetry and the Internet by Beau Blue #2

Before the world wide web, was the networking computers of FidoNet and the Crossroads Board of one of those early Fido branches. Eight or thirteen or who remembers .. but it was early. And the board had a poetry group. It was 1985.

    I worked for aerospace and it was hooked into DARPA, or ARPA, or MILSTAR, and a bunch of think-tank universities. Floating around on the net they used was the topic fa.poetry. Teeny, tiny topic hardly ever used and a complete mystery to most of the nerdy engineering types that populated the cyber wires back then.

    In 1987 because of the growth of what we called UseNet and how many people each day complained of the arcane structure of it, the great USENET reorganization happened. "rec.arts.poems" was born out of that reorganization flame war and subsequent re-ordering.

    A few mathematicians, engineers, physicists, teachers and software tricksters showed up in RAP and started to play.

    In the early nineties the 16 million user USENET turned into the more than half a billion member World Wide Web. Lately, I'm told the internet is half the planet. More than three billion.

    Internet poetry is humongous and diverse and dribbling out at every seam the thing has got. But "rec.arts.poems" is one of its roots. In the earth of the web.