Earlier in this thread Joe "Beppe" Rosenberg wrote in a helpful review of
sites:

> The group you've posted on AFW . . . has been in existence almost as long
> as the Prodigy board which evolved into E.Parker.

I'm sure that Joe meant to say "for six years longer than the Prodigy board"
(1982 being earlier than 1988, if the latter date I've seen published is
right; these dates have appeared here occasionally), but was distracted.

More historical detail:

Fora on Prodigy, Compuserve, and the like were private, for paid
subscribers. Developed in competition with (and no doubt influenced by) the
newsgroups, which were the Internet's own version of that, and were also
older (1979). (PLATO was a still earlier, and more expensive, private
service.) Peter Salus in his book on Internet history (1995) reported that
the largest firms, Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy, and GEnie, did not yet provide
direct Internet access to their subscribers as of the end of 1994, and that
most also restricted email access. (Some irony attends current popularity
of Internet services and software from certain firms that came fairly late
to it.)

Later, many such private facilities opened direct Internet email, newsgroup,
and/or live Internet access to their subscribers.

The wine newsgroup was always public. Newsgroups carried on Internet and
associated networks have been accessible since the middle 1980s to most
people in the US, and increasingly elsewhere, who wanted them, as you can
see from the archives. As a last detail, the wine newsgroup almost went
moderated in 1987 -- a step that worked successfully for other newsgroups,
continuing today. It would presumably have evolved differently if it had,
and today's junk posters would have gone elsewhere. (Sorry about that.)

Cheers -- Max