I've been on USENET since 1989, and nobody ever fussed about top-posting until the very late 1990s. People did whatever they chose. (People did fuss about not trimming down quoted material from previous posts, because bandwidth really was an issue). In the late 1990s someone invented some nonexistent netiquette rule about top-posting, and people wanting to feel like members of an ingroup began to lambaste newbies about it.
If you do a Google Groups search on "top-posting" from 1981 to 1996 you will see that there are only 52 hits and _none_ of them refer to top-posting as we know it. The hits are on things like "way-over-the-top posting" and "I had been given some kind of top posting overseas" and "On our system the FAQ was the top posting."
In 1997 we start to see entries like "You can get in a lot of trouble in the Netscape newsgroups for 'Top Posting'" and "First, please stop 'top-posting'." In 1998, "I know some groups prefer 'top' posting, but I think they've got it bassackwards, don't you?" There is an exchange
If the quoted text is included at the end of your messages instead
of
the beginning, it will significantly increase the speed of reading news. If you are a fast reader, it might even double it.
I had a long argument on this with the folks in the NetScape newsgroup a while back. While I agree with your position in general, they argued that it was an issue for `newsgroup standards' (i.e. each newsgroup adopts its own practice).
It seems to me that the `core' issue is whether Newsgroup circulation is reliable and timely enough so that you usually have the earlier messages to which some response is directed. If you do, then Top posting makes the most sense, while if you do not, Bottom posting wins.
As News delivery gets more timely and reliable, we would then expect Top posting to become more and more `the rule'...
If it originated in the Netscape groups, I don't know why. Maybe, when replying to a post, Netscape Communicator's "Collabra" pre-positioned the insertion point below the quoted text and perhaps Outlook Express, or whatever AOL was using, pre-positioned it at the top? That could explain why it became such a bone of contention
By 2000, the level of discourse has become quite elevated: "Now you have all become top-posting fjuckheads with no direction at all" and "Oh, here we have a member of the top-posting newbie faggot fan club." By 2003, "STOP top posting. That is WHY YOU ARE retarded. Got clue?" and "Hands up who isn'ta top posting fuckwit" and "Good illustration of why top posting is only done by noobs."
-- Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith@verizon.net "Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print! Sample chapter at http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html Buy it at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/