A blast from the distant past.....

[electra225]

"rec.antiques.radio+phono" was a website/forum in the early "www." days and a precursor to ARF. This was a really early antique radio website. This site was where I traded a beat up old Kennedy amp for "a few" tubes, which turned out to be three washing machine boxes full, over 35,000 tubes. I don't remember when this site died, but ARF was the main competitor. I think I joined it in 1992 when we got out first computer, a pre-Windows 95 antique. We had it updated to Windows 95, then Windows 98. It was a Compaq computer with something like 2 MB of RAM and with tiny storage. I hadn't heard of this site in eons. I ran across this post when I was looking for cartridges.

https://rec.antiques.radio-phono.narkiv ... onnections

[Ken Doyle]

I remember all the arguments about people "hawking their wares" and Bill Turner typing in all caps on his Web TV machine. I still have the handy little wooden record changer stand I bought from Bill Turner. There are pictures of one here:
https://www.byan-roper.org/steve/steve- ... stand.html

I also downloaded quite a bit of old jazz and swing music from the binary groups.

Usenet finally died off when internet providers stopped carrying it as a basic service.

[electra225]

I remember Bill Turner being one of the mainstays of that group. I'm trying to remember the guy I got the tubes from. He was from Philly and both he and his dad were regular contributors to the site.

[Firedome]

I was on the sister Usenet newsgroup rec.audio.tubes from about 1998 to 2005, but it became dominated by a few obnoxious know-it-alls and profane battling idiots, so gave up when good alternatives were out there. Surprisingly I just looked and it's still around, though just barely, and even saw a couple familiar names, though with very few recent posts, can't imagine why it still exists.

[electra225]

The guy I got the tubes from was a guy named Don. His dad was Bill. They were big on that forum. Nice guy. I enjoyed that old forum. It went away while I was going thru cancer treatment.