[trdcrdkid]

Originally Posted by jchcollins

Question - what did adult hobbyists find to talk about back in the 1980’s and 90’s when there were no TPG’s and no internet message boards?

They wrote letters to hobby publications like Sports Collectors Digest, which was the combined equivalent of eBay, Net54, and Blowout when I got seriously back into the hobby in 1991. Plus local card shops and local card shows, where most of the buying and selling that's now done online took place.

Here's one of my hobby history posts that details a big controversy over the commercialization of the hobby that took place in 1968-69. A lot of these discussions have been going on for a long time.

http://www.net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=234476

Also, see these articles in SCD about fake autographs and the problems with PSA -- from 1996, 23 years ago. They were raising many of the same issues we're dealing with today.

http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=271015

Originally Posted by jchcollins

And with such substantial less risk of being caught at doing something so outrageous as altering old baseball cards to make them look better - how do we not know or even assume that the level of alteration going on back then was WAY more prevalent than what we are seeing with PWCC today? This is after all ostensibly why PSA was even founded.

See this post about the first wave of counterfeit cards to appear in the hobby, in 1972-74. Before that there wasn't enough money in the hobby to justify anybody going to the trouble to fake stuff. But the hobby's steady growth in the 1970s (corresponding with the first baby boomers getting enough disposable income to try to recreate their childhoods) brought in a lot more money, and with it the crooks.

http://net54baseball.com/showthread.php?t=262868