On Thu, 7 Nov 2013 Nick Maclaren wrote:

In article ,
David Rance wrote:

URG is a child of its time. It's like the Fidonet which was the first
worldwide general means of electronic communication. ...

Like hell it was! Sorry, but that accolade must go to UUCP; while
it was little used outside of academia, that was simply because few
other people had computers that weren't tightly tied down. Even
Usenet (i.e. newsgroups as we know them) dates from several years
before Fidonet, and I have been using it in its previous form since
1979. By the time Fidonet appeared, UUCP had escaped from academia,
and the 'Internet revolution' had started. Google have stopped
making their history public, but their group archive dates from
1981. Fidonet dates from 1983.

I said that it was the first *general* means of electronic
communication. By that I mean available/affordable to all. UUCP may well
have predated it but UUCP was not available to all because of the high
cost of getting connected to the Internet, certainly in the UK, until
1992 when Demon first made it affordable here. You were in a privileged
position in academia that few of us could enjoy. Tom Jennings' Fidonet
was a do-it-yourself solution, springing off the back of bulletin
boards.

David

--
David Rance writing from Caversham, Reading, UK