TheElectroness@beehaw.orgtoChat@beehaw.org•what's your best internet community related memory, Beehaw?English
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1 year agoEarly 90s (like 92-94, just after the first undernet forking and while EFnet was still in one piece) IRC and getting to know like-minded people enough to talk to them offline as well and even meet them IRL.
I was 11, and handled the ‘samples’ at a BNFL booth (at an airshow) where a geiger counter was set up, it wasn’t til the demonstration guy returned and demonstrated to someone else how the coin-sized samples set off the counter that I realised it wasn’t a ‘self service’ type demonstration. The samples were labelled with their atomic symbol, and the most reactive samples were labelled as uranium (about 20mm diameter) and plutonium (about 5mm diameter). At the time I told myself they were likely fake, since leaving a plutonium sample lying around wouldn’t be very likely.
I’ve not died of radiation poisoning or cancer yet, but it’s only been 41 years.