So cool! That was an amazing read. Your memory is so much better than mine (most people's are!) and it was great to take that little trip down memory lane. My participation on mailing lists was less extensive than yours, and more of my early fannish experiences happened on newsgroups and the AOL message boards. Interestingly, the part that you mentioned that feels different from how my experience worked was the "not focused on fic" part. The Trek newsgroups evolved into more and more discussion over the years from 1994 to 1996 (when I was most active on them), but when I first joined most of the posts were fic, and most of the people I met were either writing fic, or responding to fic I wrote. I think that changed around the end of 1995/1996, when more people came in and canon/character discussion increased.

KSarchive.com exists because of the divide between slash and gen fans. I got sick of not being able to find (or even talk about) my K/S and Kirk-Spock gen in one place. Oh, if I'd only known where that would lead...