The First Chowhound Get Together (from January 2002)

[Joe H]

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/165135 is a thread along with this companion thread http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/165109 that I found scrolling on Chowhound this evening. These date to January 2002 and, to the best of my knowledge, was the first food message board get together in the D. C. area. I believe there were ten of us and we had all traded posts for a year or two dating to 1999 but nobody had met. I suggested getting together for restaurant week, something that hadn't happened before but my suggestion was directed at two who I didn't know were partnered/married to someone else. Bill Pappert picked up on this and suggested that we should all get together! James G., my wife and a few others and we ended up at Taberna's private room.

Why not! We didn't know anything about each of us, not even our ages; all we had to go on was our writing. This was before Facebook and other social media took over. We literally were winging it! Around the U. S. other groups were meeting at the same time including San Francisco and Chicago wehere they broke off and started their own board. But social interaction on the internet was still in its infancy then and this was an early effort.

Anyway, I thought that it might make for interesting reading. From almost ten years ago! I should note that there were several remarkable coincidences that we shared during the dinner. I went to high school with the father of one of the girls who was at the table! Talk about feeling old! ...ten years ago...

Some of us still know each other, in some cases well.

[ol_ironstomach]

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/165135 is a thread along with this companion thread http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/165109 that I found scrolling on Chowhound this evening. These date to January 2002 and, to the best of my knowledge, was the first food message board get together in the D. C. area.

Internet-connected dining-centric social groups were doing this many years earlier, before the general public widely adopted computer interconnectivity. I'm not counting non-food-centric groups, which obviously have been meeting at restaurants for far longer (in computing and Internet history, there is a decades-long tradition of periodic meetings at sushi restaurants).

Here's a dc.dining USENET post from 1992 announcing the *revival* of the DC CP/M-UG FOOD_SIG: http://groups.google.com/group/dc.dining/browse_thread/thread/7e121e85a07276d3?hl=en#

I imagine that users of The Source, WELL, or Compuserve can probably come up with pre-Internet BBS examples dating to the 1970s.