Reddit mentions of Enterprising Women: Television Fandom and the Creation of Popular Myth (Contemporary Ethnography)

Oh god, my heart. It's aching a bit because you're saying 1995 is old. No, no, no, that was just yesterday what are you talking about.

The beauty of fandom is that, along with being obsessive about a TV show or a movie or a book or a game or anything, is that there are people who are obsessive about fandom. And research it. And write books.

So you can find Enterprising Women by Camille Bacon-Smith and Textual Poachers by Henry Jenkins, which aren't perfect, but both of them give fantastic insight into how Star Trek fandom was in the 80s and 90s (and I believe that the latest version of Textual Poachers also gets into the transition into the Internet).

And from there, you can dig into more ethnographies and fan histories and the like. And then if you get really into it, and really want to do research, there are 'zine archives in a lot of large academic libraries (UC Riverside's and University of Iowa's are pretty amazing to browse).

But here's what I remember from being a teenager in the early '90s and being obsessed with nerdy things.

I was really into Star Trek. So I would get Starlog magazine, and read through the letters and the penpal section and all that, and I'd write to people. I submitted stuff to a few 'zines, and then from there I'd find out about other 'zines, and then I'd write to those and I'd keep writing letters and reivews and stories and sending them out.

I lived in the LA area, and Creation Cons were a big thing. I went to my first Star Trek convention in...1991, I think. And I got to hear the guests talk and check out the merchandise stalls and talk to fans and it was amazing, because here were actual people who were interested in the same things I was.

There were Star Trek cons, and Quantum Leap cons, and I went to a lot of those, and that increased my penpal list and my 'zine list and I wrote a few more random things for various places. I joined a Star Trek letter-based RPG. You would take a role on the bridge, send your actions to your captain, and they would pull everything together and send a letter back telling you what was happening on the bridge.

So, really, my fandom experience pre-Internet was a lot like my fandom experience now - it just took a lot longer and you needed a lot of stamps.