OT - reminising

Kamog · #1 February 13th, 2004, 07:04 AM

It was around 1990 that I first started using Gopher space. It was all text-only but it was great fun just wandering around looking at all sort of information. I remember using Veronica to search for things and using FTP to download files. To get images, you just see the titles of the pictures, so to view them you had to download them first and then open them using a graphics program. It was a slow process, but really exciting back then. And we had e-mail but they were all simple text and the size was limited to something like 1K. No file attachments.

So if you wanted to e-mail to somebody a picture, like a bitmap, you had to UUENCODE the file to turn it into text. Then we had to split up the text into multiple pieces each less than 1K. Then you would e-mail multiple Messages. The person who receives the Messages saves the text, deletes the header lines from each, concatenates them together in order, and UUDECODES it to get the image file back. Ahh, those were the good old days...

Shortly after that, I was introduced to NTSC Mosaic, Version 1... the graphical browser. It had the cool spinning globe logo with the arrows. It was very slow. It was wonderful. The memories...

Cipher7071 · #2 February 14th, 2004, 01:38 AM

I'm not sure when I first heard of the Internet as it exists today. However, I think it was sometime during '95 or '96 that I could first get an Internet connection by modem here without having to dial long distance. As you may have guessed, this is a remote area.

oogs · #3 February 14th, 2004, 08:26 AM

the 'net? must have been around '96, while living in England for the year. My dad decided to spend his sabbatical year working for Cambridge University (or whatever it's called... I'm not too fond of Cambridge in general). I made the wonderful decision to buy Civ 2 and C&C: Tiberium Dawn (the first one). As soon as I beat the games, I started going to my dad's office to download mods, maps and scenarios for them... along with a couple modding tools for C&C. That feels like it was such a long time ago now... weird.

PvK · #4 February 16th, 2004, 03:56 AM

'86, or thereabouts. I first used it via a local Seattle BBS (Eskimo North) which had dozens of lines hooked up to one server, which was also on the net and offered email and newsGroups etc.

PvK

Arkcon · #5 February 16th, 2004, 05:56 AM

Ah Fran, you've got me reminising as well ...

I think it was in '90 or thereabouts, my Online service, Delphi, would let you connect to the internet.

I could browse the usenet, and there was tons of stuff -- whole adventures on rec.games.frd.dnd, and complete molecular biology protocols on bionet.molbio.mthds.reagents. I could do it for hours. Loads of fun, and I could learn something useful for work.

Delphi would connect you to the world wide web, but it was non-graphical. I would go to this special address in France, and click a download link. I had a 9600 bps modem, so in just 5-7 minutes a file would download to my hard disk. I would fire up CSHOW.exe, my trusty DOS image viewer (worked fine with Windows for WorkGroups or OS/2 Warp, whatever I had booted up at the time). And then, lo, rendered in lifelike 256 colors, a naked woman

, free of charge, one brand new one everyday. What a time to be alive.

Now whatta we got, a 'net clogged with the sort of hardcore porn that would make Larry Flynt cringe. Nobody shares free scientific information anymore, you have to pay.

They say it was even better back before the 80's. Universitys were really sharing useful info, but I'd never even heard of the Internet when I was in college. Back then, when the Morris worm was released, I was just learning about PC's. The mainframe and it's dealings was too far away magical for me to begin to understand.

Puke · #6 February 17th, 2004, 06:32 AM

first, i remember the grand old network services, prodigy for home Users and compuserve to access all sorts of scientific databases. eventually they became portals to the internet, but originally they were collections of interconnected systems and databases that you could Subscribe to.

that trickled down to syndicated news Groups on BBS systems. I always wondered where they came from and how they were organized, since they seemed to be from loose coalitions rather than organized networks. I always thought they were of a considerably lower quality than the Groups and forums on our local Boards.

the same places that brought us those mysterious syndicated news Groups also brought new files that the sysops would upload. strange and interesting things from computer systems far, far away.

somehow it all turned into the internet and more and more people started accessing it, prodigy and compuserve had portals to it, and the relationships between providers on different tiers was a clearly understandable thing. these days, the only providers left are a handfull of tier-ones, and there are almost no middlemen. the MAE has almost entirely become an anachronism, and... and im talking too much.

I suppose my point is that my original perspective on what things were and how things transpired was fairly limited, but from it you can probably see the kinds of things that I was doing at the time.

Gryphin · #7 February 18th, 2004, 02:02 AM

I can't remember the year but I do remember my father asking me about it and I told him it was probably just a passing fad. I ignored it for quite while, (as I do with most medea hype). The first time I used it at home was when my step daughter, (in the 4th grade), anounced on a Sunday night that she needed an encylopedia to do a report. We didn't have one so I got out an AOL diskette and hooked us up to a 12 BAUD modem and in less than 2 hours she was all set.

[ February 17, 2004, 12:03: Message edited by: Gryphin ]