I've been looking through old Usenet archives, particularly RGVA from the early 90's and a huge percentage of posts dealt with SF2 and move lists; also raging debate over the existence of a hidden character by the name of "Sheng Long", lol, complete with theories on how to reach him and people claiming they saw a nameless someone do it at a local arcade or whatever. Evidently he's an old man with a cane, or a big hairy guy, or looks like a cross between Sagat and Ryu, or something...
Lots of complaining from the "old timers" there about all the SF2 posts and how they should get their own group, lol (which they eventually did as it turns out, and it still exists today, i.e. alt.games.sf2).
The discussions were more interesting and/or different then because there were still so many unknowns. There was no Google + millions of websites to quickly answer nearly any question you could come up with. If you guys have never checked out old Usenet archives, give it a try. It is a lot of fun to see what people were saying on the net about some of your favorite games or consoles or whatever, when they were brand new and all the rage. Google groups searches as far back as 1981, though stuff is a bit sparse from back that far. You can find posts about old consoles like Atari VCS, ColecoVision, Intellivision, etc. I couldn't find much arcade related stuff until around the late 80's / early 90's though.