Author Zhai Chenxu, 20 years of online writing
The first part of the "20 years of web articles" series:
Years after entering the Jianghu
Human memory is a kind of thing that is difficult to think rationally. We always feel that history is far away, and memories are like yesterday.
For example, when people around us talk about the disintegration of the Soviet Union, it seems to have been a thing of the past era. But when talking about literature, it seems that Chen Zhongshi and Lu Yao have not gone far, and Han Han has a sharp face
As for online literature, it is a "new thing" in the ascendant.
In the Story of Slaying the Dragon against the Sky, the white haired Zhang Sanfeng looks at Nvxia Guo's posthumous note. The bright and intelligent girl seems to be in front of him, but it was more than 100 years ago. Time has inadvertently created a lot of sadness.
Now, the "new thing" of online text has also gone through more than 20 years.
Chinese people often say that 30 years is a lifetime. Whether we admit it or not, in the first two decades of the 21st century, online literature really has a profound impact on more than one generation.
We don't need to "look back on the past century" like Immortal Zhang. Most of the heroes who have supported the network literature along the way are still elegant.
It's just more than 20 years' experience. If you look back properly, maybe it's a feeling and enlightenment.
So, what was the original web text like?
I want to say that it is a Jianghu.
The writer Jiang Nan once wrote such a scene in his book Dragon Clan, which has been used for countless years. Loser Lu Mingfei asked Gao Fushuai's friend Caesar:
Boss, do you know what Jianghu is?
Caesar immediately said that he was proficient in Chinese culture. Aren't Jianghu just a Chinese version of western knight novels, and did experts rob each other for secret scripts?
Lu Mingfei didn't dare to take over. In Lu Mingfei's mind, the Jianghu should be a place where all kinds of people come and go, and everyone gets together to do justice.
But for those who have not experienced it, it is really an unimaginable scene.
The earliest online literature was like this. At that time, capital and remuneration were far away, and everyone gathered together just to read a novel.
What is the most important thing in the Jianghu? In fact, it is not the dragon slaying sword or the Heaven Reliant Sword, but the lack of people.
The siege of Guangming Summit is a matter of the six major sects sitting down in the Jianghu. No more people, no more people, and it will become a great battle of the people.
It began in 1995, when Beijing and Shanghai connected to the 64K international line.
A Chinese can go to the building of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, fill out a form, pay a fee, and then access the network. This is the birth of the first batch of Internet users in China.
Two years later, in 1997, the number of Internet users in China was about 200000, which is an unimaginable number today. Every big V has millions of fans.
The number of netizens broke one million in June 1998.
However, the objective situation of that meeting is that the monthly dialing fee for Internet access is about 1500 yuan. Considering the overall wage level of China at that time, you will find that the vast majority of wage earners in China were not connected with the Internet.
Therefore, netizens in the 1990s were born with a class or elite nature, In the small Jianghu, only six sects can besiege the Guangming Summit, while the Seven Eccentrics in the South of the Yangtze River are obviously not good.
So who was the first group of netizens? Either there is a real mine at home, or the person who gets the first month at work.
The representative of the former may be Guo Jingming, who began to code words on the Internet in high school, which is a life that those of us who could not afford to go to Internet cafes when we were young could not imagine.
The typical representative of the latter can be understood as Lu Jinbo and where he is today.
Lu Jinbo became the general manager of Shaanxi Haibo Network Company in Xi'an in 1997. Now He Zai has gone to Nanchang Telecom Bureau after graduating from university.
The first batch of websites were set up by local telecom bureaus, and some netizens at the age of "XX Information Port" This kind of website should be familiar.
At that time, the information port was much more lively than the current portal websites in various cities, because there were few people who knew about the Internet at that time, and they were all young people. For the age group, they were about the post-75 generation.
Facts have proved that these information ports born from within the system have become the initial soil for the later birth of web articles. Give a few random examples.
At that time, the portal website of Xi'an was called "Ancient City Hotline", and there were many forums under the portal website, one of which was called "Online Tea Garden". Later, several moderators in this forum set up Xilu BBS after leaving.
If the term Xilu will still make some people feel strange, then Xilu BBS will later breed the starting Chinese website and the Magic Sword Book Alliance.
Of course, this is another story. We will tell it in detail later.
The name of Jinjiang Information Port under Jinjiang Telecom Bureau is so obvious that it can compete with the "Ancient City Hotline".
In short, the literature channel of "Jinjiang Information Port" became "Jinjiang Original Network" a few years later, and later changed its name to "Jinjiang Literature City".
If only from the perspective of naming, "Jinjiang" is the most "original intention" in the online platform.
Time unknowingly prepared everything.
Not only the network environment, but also the people, the post-75s, will set off a storm in the next 20 years, and become the familiar trendsetters.
After talking about the Internet, let's talk about literature.
If only from the perspective of literary history, the decline of traditional literature in 1995 could not be seen.
The craze caused by Jia Pingwa's "The Waste Capital" has not passed yet. Yu Hua has just finished the book "Xu Sanguan's Blood Selling Story", which is second only to "Living". Wang Xiaobo is still waiting for the opportunity with high ambitions
But this is far from the whole literature of that era.
Compared with serious literature, the great god that students like more is Huang Yi (Hong Kong chivalrous novel writer, his representative work, The Biography of Two Dragons in the Tang Dynasty) It is the Jianghu supported by Kou Zhong and Xu Ziling, and Xiang Shaolong's bloody battlefield (All three are protagonists in Huang Yi's novels) 。
Countless scholars in the early period inevitably thought of Huang Yi.
Hong Kong swordsman writer Huang Yi
What impressed me most was that when Mr. Huang Yi passed away in 17 years, I chased many novels. The authors recalled the scene that they stayed up late to chase Huang Yi's novels after the update on that day.
Serials of novels are not new, but for those born after 75 or even 80, they probably haven't seen them.
After all, Jin Yong's splashing on Ming Pao is a matter of the last generation.
Huang Yi's novels were only available in Hong Kong and Taiwan at that time, so it became the most fashionable thing for college students to see Huang Yi's novels at the first time.
One problem that serial novels face is timeliness, and it is difficult to pirate, because a serial is about tens of thousands of words, printing is not only slow, but also difficult to sell. Many pirated booksellers can only wait for three in one to print, which worries about a large number of fans.
The demand forces the market, but when the pirated booksellers in the market are helpless, The subjective initiative of college students was developed, and each of the eight immortals showed his or her own magic power when crossing the sea.
Well connected college students ask their friends in Taiwan to send the latest books by express mail, then disassemble them, scan them or type them by hand, and upload them to the BBS of the university.
It is probably Shuimu Tsinghua BBS Forum of Tsinghua University. Of course, this is a relatively late time. This forum was established in 1998. At the earliest time, some other websites also did this.
However, the top students are really top students with high efficiency. The books published by Hong Kong and Taiwan on the same day will appear on the BBS of Shuimu Qinghua the next afternoon at the fastest time.
Later, Weid, the vice president of CrossChina, was very impressed with this history. At that time, everyone looked at the monthly serial on the BBS, and even who typed the serial could guess, because the wrong characters are the same.
No matter how we look back on this history, BBS forum is an inextricable name for online articles, We can even name the development of web articles before the millennium as the "forum era".
That is the earliest rudiment of the online literature Jianghu.
With the Jianghu, there are sects. Forums of all sizes begin to grow savagely on the Guangming Summit.
Many people will mention golden bookshelf In fact, it can be pushed earlier.
The earliest online forum was born in the Chinese community in North America or among college students in Taiwan, probably Yuanyuan Forum Later, there was a website called "Yuanyuan Library", in which many writers that we were familiar with later came out, such as Rosen who later wrote "The Story of Scenery".
The website of that meeting is a mixture of good and bad people. There are good novels, but many of them are also novels with a little color. This is also the true situation of the web articles at that time. They are too pure to read.
This approach has continued in Taiwan for many years, and Rosen later wrote works such as "The Age of Ali Buda".
On the mainland, the earliest is Jinyong Inn.
This forum or website belongs to "Sina", but it was not "Sina" at that time, and its more primitive name was "Sifang Tongli".
Jinyong Inn is the earliest original literature community. It was established in August 1996, which is a strange time.
In the next few years, this "sect" will continue to produce a large number of heroes who will travel in the Jianghu later. What we know well is where we are now and Jiangnan. In fact, Jinyong Inn is also the beginning of the dream of "Old Jiuzhou" later.
Jiangnan, He Zai and others
By 1998, the Golden Book House had become the Eden of early online readers.
However, as far as the literary attribute is concerned, there is a lack of stamina in itself.
Most of the gold bookstores are OCR books (physical scanning), and the number is not much. The more famous books may be Star Wars Heroes, Lost Star Path and Tales of Charm, in addition to Holy Land and Tianlu Fengyun.
We may now think that this is a very low thing, scanning physical books and putting them online, but at that time, it was really a mainstream form of online literature.
Xiaoxiang Academy official website
The later Xiaoxiang Academy also developed smoothly by this model until 2000, but the number of non original is really limited.
After reading a limited number of books, a group of people were forced to find their own way, Some chose to write by themselves, which gave birth to the first group of real network writers.
Later, Bao Jianfeng (Lin Tingfeng) was one of them, and he was one of the few writers who could keep changing every day in the late 1990s.
The writer Bao Jianfeng, whose masterpiece is Legend of Magic Knight Heroes
If someone practices martial arts diligently, someone will establish his own sect.
Later, a student in the computer department of Peking University did not choose this path, but creatively thought that "if there is a literary website with complete content, fast update and large number, it can meet my needs".
In the forum era, it is obviously not ordinary people who have this pattern, and this person from Peking University is indeed not ordinary people. His name is Wu Wenhui.
Later, Bao Jianfeng with a literary dream and Wu Wenhui with a big pattern (President of Shengda Literature) They got together and started to practice the website they had in mind. This website is called Startupbootchinese.
This is another legend several years later.
After 1998, in addition to the golden bookstores and literary halls, more and more literary forums began to emerge in the Jianghu of online literature. It felt like there were heroes coming out of the world.
Looking back now, it may be the purest era of network literature.
Those young people who spend high prices on the Internet have no interests or money in their eyes. They think more about the dream of literature and the pleasure of reading.
The whole Jianghu is waiting for the order of a dragon slaying knife.
But no one thought that this dragon slaying knife would be picked up by a young man from North America, and then rolled up all over the sky.
The legend of the era of online forum will usher in a real sense of grandeur in 1998.
To be continued, the "20 years of web articles" series is continuously updated
Author Zhai Chenxu ©️ Submission Guide
