On a recent visit to my parent’s, my Mom reminded my Dad to show me something he found while rummaging around in his old office. But first, a little background to lead into the story.
Usenet
In the 90s, before eBay, a common way to sell things online was to do a Usenet auction. For those that don’t know, Usenet was one of the original parts of the internet that predated the World Wide Web (which is what most refer to as the internet today). Usenet was essentially a giant message board, with various groups using syntax similar to today’s domain names. For example, there were many Atari-related groups within comp.sys.atari, such as comp.sys.atari.8bit and comp.sys.atari.st. Atari 2600 game stuff could be found in a slightly different area: alt.atari.2600. If you were into BASIC, you might have liked alt.lang.basic.
Anyway, there were groups for just about any topic. Google Groups use to provide access to Usenet, but that shut down recently. I have not accessed Usenet in 25 years, so I don’t know much about it these days. My understanding is that it is not used much and its usages might be less than legal, but it is still around.
I did stumble across UsenetArchives.com which seems to have archives of many areas. Here are the two main Atari ones:
It’s interesting to read through some of the posts from the early days of the ST to see what sort of things were being discussed. I didn’t see a way to really search things, though.
Now let’s get back to Usenet auctions.
Auctions
I’m not sure when they started, but I personally started doing Usenet auctions around 1994 or so on my Mega STE. A Usenet auction was essentially a usenet post with a list of items you were selling. In my case, I would buy Atari-related things at flea markets (cartridge games, mostly) and list them in a Usenet post. There would be starting bids next to each item.
People would then email bids to you. Typically once a day you would review all the emails, sort out the high bids for each item and then do another Usenet auction post the next day. An auction would go for about a week as I recall.
Yes, this was all as tedious as it sounds. But it worked. When the auction ended, each winning bidder would be notified via email of their total with shipping and then they would have to send the money by mailing a check. This was all incredibly time consuming and took forever. It took a few days for the checks to start arriving, then you had to take them to the bank (waiting in line), there were no ATM deposits that I recall back then. After that was the packing and delivery to the post office, which also required waiting in line as online shipping labels were not a thing back then either. Looking back, it hardly seems to have been worth it.
Essentially eBay was founded as a way to simplify Usenet auctions. Although eBay started in 1995, I didn’t start using it until 1998 and it definitely made things much, much easier.
I didn’t do a lot of Usenet auctions. It was more of a minor side-hustle back then. But I remember showing my Dad how I did them and he got hooked. He would go to garage and yard sales in his area and buy up anything that was related to retro computers and video games to resell. He would then spend hours and hours creating Usenet auctions to sell stuff.
What my Dad found in his office was a letter he had mailed to someone that had won one of his auctions for a label for the Berzerk Atari 2600 cartridge. Here is the opening paragraph:
Hi.
You are now the proud owner of a new BERZERK label. It was printed on Kodak Picture paper instead of the self-sticking Avery Ink Jet label paper. This means that it will have to be glued onto the cart, however, the picture is of a much higher quality and sharpness. I tried to be very careful when cutting out the labels, but some of them may need some more trimming depending on your tastes. I had a loads of fun hours doing them and hope that you will have as many fun hours talking about them. Enjoy and please let me know if you have any questions concerning the new Berzerk label.
For your reading pleasure, I've included a 'BERZERK' original storyline authored by me and I hope you enjoy it, as much as I did making it up. While reading it, you will see mention of many 2600 games in the text, none of which should be shown more than once. See if you can find all of the over 50 games that are mentioned in the story. Please note that for the sake of the story, I have had to make some of the Game names take on a plural form. Take care and have fun during the Holidays, but most important, have a very safe and happy Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Larry
My Dad does not recall specifics about this or when it was actually sent, but the header at the top of the printout shows this file path:
d:\download\text\berzerk-lab-storyline
With that header, I’m fairly confident this was written in around 1996-1998. Because that path has a filename that is longer than 8 characters it could not have been an Atari ST path. That means it had to have been done during the period of time when he was using a Windows computer. I also think this was not the result of an eBay auction, but that is more of a gut feeling at this point.
I will post the full Berzerk story written by my Dad in part 2 on Monday.
Usenet was one of the few connections to the ST world along side IRC chat rooms and FTP sites.
In addition to buying stuff for my STe I also traded 2600 games, sell a couple of"uncommons" I bought at a thrift store for some more common games I actually wanted to play.
I have an eBay account but never bought anything off it, since i have Amazon for online purchases. But still I miss the ol' pre-Web days of the Internet...