While hanging out with the folks at Harvard's student radio station for a story about a long-running specialty show, Phoenix music editor Michael Brodeur was shown a shelf filled with grade-school-style composition notebooks dating back to the early 1980s. Since first coming on the air in 1984, DJs at WHRB's Record Hospital have been keeping meticulous records of every night, every playlist, every song (or non-song) they've ever played. (And let's face it: any radio station that can go 24 years without playing "Sister Christian" deserves a closer look.)

The hand-written journals, which were kept in the studios and became the primary means of communication between dozens of DJs, reveal that many of the tropes that we tend to associate with message boards -- the snarky put-downs, the punning screen-names, the long-running flame wars -- were actually alive and kicking at least a decade before the Web browser. It's kind of like finding AIM chats in a cave painting.