Why not the character in that case? hehe

Those are quarks, judging by their observed behavior of self-assembling into Unicode for the bacteria emoji.

BBS were very much a foundational building block of the internet, yes. As a former Discourse employee I’ve been effectively trying to bring back that bygone era.

But Usenet et.al. predates the world-wide-web by a decade, and In this piece I’m subtly making the case that WWW is when the internet first took material form, becoming visible to the naked eye.

www is just the easily visible part of the internet that everyone could access. Usenet, BBS, email etc are all non-www parts of the internet that were more important in its early history but harder to access because you couldn't just point one program at them. www just happened to evolve fast enough that it could emulate the old layers, e.g. Hotmail is the thing that kept emails alive past 1995. I'm sure that without a www front end email would have gone the way of gopher.

And we had the “calling card” already with the `.plan` file, thank you very much.