Dating myself here, but I recall first following newsgroups just prior to the great renaming in late 80s. I forget the exact name but net.bicycle??? became rec.bicycles.rides. In this era prior to invention and adoption of www, the group sometimes had trip reports in ASCII format. I still have a trip report I sent via nntp about a 1994 Ride the Rockies trip -
Ride the Rockies '94 and also put my Atlantic Coast trips in 1995.
By mid-1990s, there was bit more separation of trip reports and discussion groups. I followed rec.bicycle.rides in that era but then also used the web more for trip reports, both posting and reading. My first digital camera came in 1996 and others seemed to get them in similar era so that changed trip reports, access and discussion a lot.
I came into this discussion group at tail end of 2007, so a lot more recent. Not sure I've seen as many differences in discussions since that time...more differences in contrast to newsgroup discussions.
I figure that mev is the person with the most experience here going back to the beginnings of it all, really fascinating how you did those early trip reports, even the old journalist thing of "reading over the phone to the editor" bit.
And really fascinating your take on having been there from the beginning beginning.