WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OLD COMPUTER CHAT BOARDS?

What happened to the old Chat Boards? A story long forgotten. And one day...

Years ago in the beginnings of computers when people had to use modems to get on the Internet, there was something called a "Chat Board" where people could get together and talk. There were thousands of them all over the world. Talk was free and unregulated by anyone. The world was fun on the Internet.

One such board was called, Yupi.com. It was by far one of the best innovative boards ever with high tech software and organized methods for chatting with many different chat rooms of serious people with varying interests, some professionals, some sport-minded, some wanting to learn the language of the nation, in this case, Spanish, and just about anything you could think of was on Yupi.com.

There was a time when I was learning Spanish for no other reason that to possibly escape to the unknown worlds of the south. Adventure was a way of life for me in the early days.

I would get on Yupi and speak to best of my ability and became quite fluent in the language. Night after night I spoke to people in Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, anywhere in South and Central America. I was single again, a field engineer that traveled all week, and was otherwise free to search for greater adventure for my life ahead. The future was all in front of me.

Then, an ad popped up on the screen for something called English Town. Learn English it said in Spanish. I was amused and clicked on it. To my amazement it seemed to be dominated by Asians, saying, "Hello. How are you?" "I am fine," came an answer in slow lumbering English.

It was soon apparent there was no native English speaker in the chat room. So, I joined in, "HI, everyone. I'm Ted and I'm a native English speaker. Who wants to talk?"

After a long pause, finally a few started talking and soon there was a semblance of a conversation abounding in English.

A few days later I searched for Yupi.com and was met by a message that said it had been shut down. I did some searching, though there were few search engines back then. It was up to your computer to find things based on your spelling and in some cases, IP addresses.

I later found out that Microsoft had bought them out, like they were buying all of the chat boards one by one. Why, I wondered. Why would a new operating system company want chat boards? Microsoft bought the boards and simply shut them down, never to be heard from again.

For a long time, MSN had a chat board that competed against AOL and YAHOO. Those three were all that was left. None of these boards had the technology or the fun that Yup.com had. None.

Sometimes, big business destroys development, not improves it.

However, it was on an English chat board that I got into a conversation about my old career field of broadcasting with a young Chinese female broadcaster with big dreams. 

She spoke of her radio shows and how she was building the first American Country Music radio and TV shows in Shanghai, China. She heard my voice and recognized the trained phraseology and enunciation of a professional broadcaster as I had been in the past. Her name was Cathy Chen. She would one day become my wife.

The story continues ......The Switch From Spanish to Chinese...on a later post.