O'Reilly Network: I Remember USENET [Dec. 21, 2001] I made many friends and came to know many others, though 99 percent of them I had not met in the flesh. Indeed, there were people at my university whom I interacted with on the Net but rarely in the physical world. We all discovered quickly how easy it was to depersonalize people when communicating purely by writing. Perfectly reasonable people would get quickly involved in "flame wars" and use invectives they would never say to a person's face.

As these archives return to the world, I have to admit some trepidation. Reading my old words I am sometimes painfully informed of how naive, and sometimes plain wrong, the younger me could be.