OT - reminising

[Arkcon]

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.