Deja Vu?
There's two things quite interesting about this as one of the early posts on FlyerTalk:
1) The topic is about American and US Airways and merging accounts for redemption ... gee, FlyerTalk was certainly ahead of its time, by 13 years because isn't the same talk going on right now with the anticipated merger of these same two frequent flyer programs?
2) It also points out just how slow conversations were in the early days of FlyerTalk. For instance, notice that this first post was on May 5, 1998. It had a reply on May 13, 1998 but it did not get any subsequent attention until December 19, 2005 ... over seven years later. Yes, the early days of FlyerTalk were much different than today.
But the early members never complained about the lack of content, they were here to help one another and that is how it all started. A very patient group we were.
BTW, MileMonitor and MilesChick were all in-house monikers engaged to help stimulate conversation since in those days forums as we know them today were relatively rare.
As for the post numbering - keep in mind that as previously noted there were hundreds if not thousands of posts created between the actual start of FlyerTalk in 1995 and this restart in 1998. In those days, importers and filters weren't so good and as i recall few if any original posts were ported over. The first forum was a custom build (there was no actual forum software in those days), then when this "Alliance" post was made we decided to convert to out custom build to a forum platform known as UBB, then years later as we outgrew the abilities of UBB, we moved to vBulletin where it remains today. I'm thinking the custom build of our original forum software cost me about $20K in 1995 dollars to get built as i was totally convinced that i could help frequent flyers learn to share their knowledge and their like-minded friendships.