Quote: A Brief History of Breast Expansion by Glenn G.Gather around, children. Some of you have wondered from whence came this thing we call 'BE', and how such an unlikely thing came to pass in the first place. Well, settle down, get comfortable, and I will tell you the story. Is the story true, you might ask? To that I can only answer, it is the truth that *I* saw it, as I lived it. Someone else may have lived a different truth, but in general, I suspect we old-timers will agree on most points.It all started about nine years ago, and the Internet of nine years ago was a very different place, let me tell you! Most people had modems no faster than 2400 baud, bandwidth was precious, and the vast majority of us had Internet accounts through our schools, or, more rarely, through work. This is important, because in those days, the schools and/or workplaces had rather strict policies regarding what you could and couldn't do with what access they gave you. There were no Hotmail or Yahoo mail accounts, and in fact, there was no Web! The USENet had not yet discovered the commercial possibilities of Spam (in very large part because school accounts did not permit such) and so was actually useful. All in all, quite different from the glitzy, high-speed 'net of today.So, back to nine years ago...I was pretty much a net-newbie, getting the hang of reading through dozens of USENet newsgroup posts in a big hurry, when I came across something strange. In the newsgroup 'alt.sex.stories', this guy had put in a request for a certain type of story to be written. Now, by itself, that was nothing new--happened all the time. People always wanted their own fetishes to be catered to. But this guy said he wanted to read stories about girls whose breasts grew, and that he'd post one if someone else did. Well, this was certainly -different-, and lo, the next day, someone had hacked up this cruddy little tale that was poorly described and over in a flash. The first poster responded, saying that was an interesting first attempt, but that he had something more like this in mind...and posted "The Mistake". He said he was posting it for a friend, which back then pretty much meant he didn't want to claim authorship, in the event that word somehow got back to his boss and/or school. And "Mistake" was followed by a few others, and the phenomenon was off and rolling. But for the first couple of years, it rolled -slowly-. I religiously scanned the a.s.s. newsgroup for anything that might be a BE story (the term 'BE' itself was coined by the first poster). But a month or two might go by without seeing anything new. And while there were a few morphed pictures out there, they were creations of BBSes and used pretty much as advertising pictures--nothing at all to do with the BE movement. Oh, and by today's standards, they weren't good quality at all. As time went on, there were fewer and fewer stories posted, and things looked grim. However, a light broke through the darkness and gave the BE movement a fighting chance. Someone, and it pains me to say I don't remember who (Wren tells me it was Dr. Enlarge himself), formed a mail-list for those who wanted to write BE stories, and it was mentioned once on a.s.s. I was there, signing up in a flash! It didn't last very long, but it was the first attempt to give BE writers (and fans, like me) a sense of community, a place to share news, and a place where we were normal (well, as normal as we got, anyway). As I said, it didn't last long--people's addresses were always changing, as they left college or what have you. It did last long enough, though, to do one -very- important thing. It announced the Acotto ftp site. Now, lots of you have heard of this mythical place, where there were endless fields of milk and honey, and enormous breasted women frolicked with scientists bent on increasing their size still further. In fact, it was the first archive. And as such, it saved the concept of BE.I'm -not- being melodramatic here. The first list was always very small, and most people never knew of its existence. The ftp site was a gathering point, a focus if you would, for those interested in BE. Things -stayed- there, so others could see and enjoy. This was when morphs started to be collected, since now there was a place you could actually download them! This is where Al started archiving R&D, which originally had no name. This is where some of our best talent joined us, like Johnny Swell and Bust Artist, when they could see that there were others like themselves out there who appreciated what they had hidden away in their sketchbooks. It was a place to share with those you trusted not to spread it around too much. So let ftp.netcom.com/user/a/acotto go down in history forever! And, Anthony, I know you're out there still. I just want to say thanks, publicly, for what you did for us. And the Acotto archive lasted for a few years, which was incredible for the times. But Netcom was always in it for the money, and at one point, Anthony's little (well, not so little) ftp site was drawing 25% of the hits to Netcom's public ftp machine. Despite necessary cutbacks in the size, eventually, for no specific and good reason given, Acotto's was closed by the management of Netcom. And the clouds rolled back across the sky. (A little side note here--a year after Acotto's closed, a friend of mine loaned me a book called _Places on the NET -They- Don't Want You To See_...and it had Acotto's listed. Almost dropped my jaw to the floor, especially when it became obvious that the authors thought all those pictures were real...and the publication date on the book was just before the site's closure. Not a coincidence, I'm sure.)But Al's (approximately) monthly newsletter kept being sent out, to those of us smart enough to subscribe to it. And it maintained that necessary sense of community we had come to enjoy at Acotto's. Eventually, one article in it told of the formation of a new mail-list. It seemed there was a 'Balloon-buddies' list that handled all aspects of the sexual nature of inflation and balloons--including, it seemed, some BE. But this list was splitting up into several different lists, for a variety of reasons, and that there was to be a list dedicated specifically to BE! For details, get ahold of Inflate123, who was there at this time, in the thick of things.So, quite naturally, I joined this new 'BE-buddies' list. And one of the first topics of discussion was how to create another Acotto-style ftp site. Over time, it became obvious that we really couldn't. No one of us had the storage space or bandwidth necessary to do such--and remember, most of us were on .edu accounts, still. Oh, we tried. We used the cluon ftp site, we had LBurns' site, the Missouri stories site, and of course, SturmB's -immense- collection, which had to wander around a lot, because his ISP didn't really like anonymous ftp-ing... And in amongst these attempts, we wrote, and discussed, and bickered (rarely), tried to discover Wren's hat size, and bemoaned the lack of anything stable. In short, we became a definite community--even a family. Mastophilus ran the list for a -long- while, until life forced him to hand it over to Cygor.But all this time, technology didn't remain static. Modem speeds were going up, bandwidth costs were coming down, and it was becoming possible for one person, if they really wanted, to become widely known on this new thing called the Web. One man put up a website as an alternative to the spam-filled alt.sex.breast.* newsgroups, and the BE-buddies started to join that, when it was forced down by high costs. Inflate123 and LVKane put up their sites. In February, 1997, Strikr, of the Be-buddies, formed the BE_Loft, a Dalnet chatroom so we could talk in realtime with each other. And just before that, this guy, who we'll call the BEArchive Owner, put up the first version of the BEArchive around June of 1997, which back then was pretty much a japanese manga site, then a stories collection, but over time got it's own server and an immense clientele which, if you're actually reading this, you likely are part of. Wren, a -LONG- time BE writer and contributor put up his site for BE and a number of other related interests three months after the BEA went up.And now, on the verge of the year 2000? Who knows what'll happen next. There are BE-fans all over the globe. The Be-buddies are still going strong. There are -numerous- BE sites scattered about the Earth and the movement, no matter how silly it may appear to some, is a ummm, growing concern. Not too bad for under a decade, eh?That, my children, is the tale, at least for now. Perhaps one of you will become a research biochemist and invent a true BE formula, or a molecular physicist, and find a way to add breast flesh with a ray. In any case, you now know the past, go forth and make tomorrow. See you in the Loft!FINGlennG