This fan fiction is older than the push-through tabs on soda cans.

Your grandma wrote this on her Commodore 64.

I miss my Commodore 64

Oh my dear, sweet children. The Commodore 64 came out in 1982. This was produced on a typewriter and probably mimeographed. And while it may seem funny now, it took more courage to write and distribute this than you will ever  know.

Reblogged for that last comment.

respect your elders

Children, in the olden days fanfiction was written on a typewriter, copied and sent by snail mail. Getting one one of those letters from across the world was every bit as exciting as getting a notification that your favorite writer posted a new fic.

For the curious, this story was originally published in the third volume of Grup, a printed Star Trek erotica fanzine that ran for six issues between 1972 and 1978. Scans of the magazine’s complete publication can be found online, with a bit of digging.

(If you’re not familiar with the history of fanzines, I highly recommend reading up on it - it’s fascinating stuff. Many of the conventions of writing that are often thought of as characteristic of the social media generation - including, for example, publishing under cryptic aliases of the sort that would later become the norm in online communities like Tumblr - actually got their start in printed fanzines several decades before the rise of the Internet.)

I LOVE FANDOM HISTORY