Storage was still pretty expensive, and there we transitions in computing from originally paper terminals to screen and people didn’t have a sense of long-term retention of personal messages (I guess many people probably felt that way about SMS messages on mobile). There also wasn’t really a way to look at a user’s “profile” like you have on Lemmy - to see everything you post in any topic - which a search-engine provided a way to search for your name across a time period.
Why did change the perceived nature? That discussion became less ethereal?
Storage was still pretty expensive, and there we transitions in computing from originally paper terminals to screen and people didn’t have a sense of long-term retention of personal messages (I guess many people probably felt that way about SMS messages on mobile). There also wasn’t really a way to look at a user’s “profile” like you have on Lemmy - to see everything you post in any topic - which a search-engine provided a way to search for your name across a time period.