Your logic here seems to be: the Internet was avaliable, and _I_ had it, therefore the volume and frequency of info and discussion was equal to today. However by your own admission and that of others, it was much less common than now. Nobody is saying these things didn't exist, just that the speed and volume of information and resultant conversation would have been much smaller than it was in, the present day, even the nineties, than it was in 1986.
Well, the first time I used the internet was at the university in 1997-98. It took 5 minutes literally for a simple page to download. We had to wait about 15 minutes to watch a movie trailer. Nowadays my phone can download full movies in that time.
In which case there's no way to compare then vs. now. I mean, I didn't go to the Star Wars Celebration convention that recently happened but I didn't need to because the highlights were posted on Youtube within 24 hours. In other words, as soon as anybody says anything about Discovery in any context, everyone is gonna know now thanks to the internet.
One of the reasons we have not seen additional set photos even from paparazzi is because Alfredo Romano director of Toronto’s Pinewood Studios source How Toronto’s film and TV production has surged past $2 billion There you have it. Starfleet Command will be one of the standing sets in the new series.
Key phrase there - computer science degree in programming. Although it's fair to say there are probably a higher than average number of Trek fans along computer scientists and tech wizards using the earliest forms of the internet, it doesn't come close to representing the fandom at large that the scale of the internet does today. Even the last decade or so with the advent of social media and the movement of the internet from a nerdy pastime to a mainstream part of everyday life will have created an online presence for the average Trek viewer that would never have existed even for Enterprise.
The amount of information available via the Internet and USENET prior to the mid 90's was minuscule. I was doing my computer science degree in 1990, and even then, I was only able to get to USENET via an email gateway (i.e. not easy even for a university student, nearly impossible for the general public - even if you knew it existed, which most did not). It was wonderful and there were great communities back then, but the internet as we think of it today didn't really exist until the mid-90's at the earliest.
Internet access via some of the larger dial-up services such as CompuServe, Concentric Research, Delphi, and GENIE was also an option. Have a look at these posts from just one Usenet newsgroup that spans from 1982 through about 1986 (though the order is rather chaotic). You'll note that the content very much resembles what you might find here on TrekBBS. Here's some early speculation found on Usenet about the upcoming movie, "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" You'll also find discussions about the composition of photon torpedoes and guesses about their origins in Trek, debates about Kirk and Spock playing chess, discussion about a new series in the works, and many other gems. And the Internet wasn't the only game in town. Many local, dial-up BBSes back then were part of the FidoNet system which enabled them to share discussion boards, email, and files across the North American continent (presumably there were similar systems in other parts of the world).
I disagree with that. There was lots of information available via USENET at least in the very early 90s. I don't know about earlier. A bunch of those groups really felt like precursors to TrekBBS. The only difference is that photographs were few and far between, at least from what I can remember. I guess you just had to know where to look?
Fall (I think) of 1996. It was also in the crosshairs of Paramount when they went after fan sites around that same time. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/paramount-locks-phasers-on-trek-fan-sites/
I had a friend with a computer around 1990 and we used to print reams of stuff for me to take home and read. Lot's of comments about STNG of course. I was also on Trekweb when it started. RAMA