The First Gay Space on the Internet: soc.motss, but I'm here to decipher what kind of bear Wilford Brimley was!

The First Gay Space on the Internet

It was called soc.motss, and it anticipated how we use social networks today

https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/online-gay-culture-and-soc-motss-how-a-usenet-group-anticipated-how-we-use-facebook-and-twitter-today.html

I mostly looked to see what kind of news group this was and discovered the NATURAL BEAR CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM that gays used years ago.... Or now.

The guy who started SOC.MOTSS looks the coomer part, pictured here:

Steve Dyer, founder of soc.motss.

Chuds were on the attack from the earliest days:

Here's the Slate article's part introducing the BEAR CODES of gays in the late 80's.

Some of that nerdiness spread beyond motss. The geeky urge to classify resulted in the Bear Code (officially, the Natural Bears Classification System), invented by Bob Donahue and Jeff Stoner in 1989 as an “incredibly-scientific system to describe bears and bear-like men.” Santa Claus' classification, for instance, was “B8 d++ f? w++ k–?,” describing him as a big round (w++) daddy bear (d++) with a very bushy beard (B8) whom people guess to be averagely furry (f?) and not kinky at all (k–?).

This format inspired the later Geek Code, which was ubiquitous in Unix profiles and email sigs in the 1990s—except instead of codes for weight and beard, the Geek Code offered opinions of Linux (l+++++ if you were Linux author Linus Torvalds) and Star Trek (t— if you hated Star Trek). The origins of the Geek Code in the Bear Code were quickly forgotten.

I can't copy paste this long mess of scientific gay autism except there's some fun stuff in here like Wilford Brimley's rating!

NBCS (...or Bear codes... or those darned abbreviations :)

4/26/91 - post date

by HASH BROWNS

alt.s*x.motss (members of the same s*x)

Source link: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.s*x.motss/c/x6POznoEu9o/m/KukmNkFP_swJ