Just a follow-up on the above post:
If you were suggesting that Titor/TT0 had an effect while he was posting here and on Post-2-Post you need to put the situation in perspective. Contrary to what you might have read on this and other sites, TimeTravel_0 was not a big deal on Post-2-Post (P2P). P2P was Art Bell's BBS. There were hundreds of threads and thousands of posters. It was a huge and very busy BBS requiring financing from Premier Radio Broadcasting, the company responsible for syndicating Bell's radio show. At that time both here and on P2P if was unnecessary to register in order to post. I didn't register on either site for quite some time. Anyway, The "Titor" threads on P2P were followed by about 2 dozen people who were almost to a person the same people here.
Compare the couple dozen people on P2P following TT0 to the main forum on P2P. That was Richard C. Hoagland's "Mission Enterprise" forum. He had about a thousand followers. Most of P2P was that forum and they had zero interest in Titor/TT0. All the "Marz Barz" people cared about was the gub'mit conspiracy to deny "The Face on Mars" because that was all Hoagland was on about.
Art Bell shut down P2P one night right in the middle of us posting - no notice, no warning just Poof! the site was gone. Rick Donaldson, Pamela Moore and I became the mods here a short time later. We invited all the orphaned P2P time travel enthusiasts to register here (by this time registration was a requirement). We said no to Hoagland. The Marz Barz crowd and their constant off the wall fighting was a big part of why Bell shut it down. Bell's mod/sysadmin and his wife were completely worn out by the ordeal. We didn't see any benefit.
That's the perspective. The Titor/TT0 discussion on P2P, and that's where the majority of the posts were made, was less than a blip on the P2P radar. The story was virtually unknown. There was no chance it had any impact while he was here. And keep in mind that you can't directly compare the World Wide Web (WWW) of today to 1999. In 1999 there may have been a few thousand people posting on P2P but that was a bunch of people who had some money. Computers were very expensive. Internet access was very expensive - you bought so many minutes a month for a flat rate and paid a per minute rate if you exceeded your base allowance (as I recall on Cox it was something like $45/month for 500 minutes and $.10/minute thereafter). Few people had computers. Few people were running Win 3.1 NT (internet capable Windows 3.0). Even fewer had Internet access. Windows 98 (almost plug-n-play internet set-up) didn't come out until 2000. I didn't get internet access until 1998, less than a year before TItor started posting. Firewall routers (NAT) were just coming out and were not cheap - and they were SLOW. Anti-virus software was in its infancy. That's the world we lived in. That's even less chance for Titor/TT0 to have an impact.
After Titor left this site we had our two or three exasperatingly annoying trolls but otherwise TTI almost died. In reality, by 2002 maybe as many as a hundred or two hundred people had even heard about Titor but it remained only topical to the two dozen that had significant knowledge. So.....
Rick and I purposely pumped up the topic to bring some life back to TTI - otherwise the Titor story was DOA. It worked for a couple of years but people eventually fell away again. And then one hot August night in 2003, a few weeks after the John Titor Foundation (JTF, Larry Haber President and legal counsel) was formed as a Florida corp there was a poster (JTFan) who spammed hundreds of sites all over the world in one night pumping The Book. I still have the notes on an old HDD. But I do recall that everyone at the JTF was using the same email address as JTFan. Rick and I had email contact with the person claiming to be the lead on The Book team. He said there was no Kay Titor - they wrote the book in the studio. He used the same email address. At one point Larry haber contacted us using the same email address. And the physical address for The Book team and CGA graphics design studio were all the same - Larry Haber's client, a professional film production studio, in the same building as Haber's law office. People wondered how a typical internet story teller could come up with the convincing technical drawings. I can't say for sure they were designed and printed in the studio at 800 Celebration Ave. but they surely had the equipment and talent to do so. Actually the graphics design studio was just one department for a full professional movie production studio in the same building. Larry was an officer and legal counsel for that business. (I can't recall the business name - but it is in the notes as well as on some thread in the TTI archive.)
