Telehack Re-Creates the Internet of 25 Years Ago

Re:Nostalgia never made sense to me by tetrahedrassface · 2011-05-13 14:56 · Score: 2

I think the point is, but may be wrong, is that now it is ubiquitous, whereas before it was something a person wanted or was drawn to do. Computing today is kinda lame really, because it isn't exclusive at all. It gets old, invasive, and yes all over the place. But has it solved any of the worlds problems? *looks around*... we still have plenty. *goes back into cave*

Re:Nostalgia never made sense to me by Oshawapilot · 2011-05-13 15:06 · Score: 2

Agreed. I was excited to find a BBS a few months ago that was still running the same software I used when I was a SysOp myself in the late 80's. After about 15 minutes online the nostalgia effect quickly gave way to the reality that, well...it just sucked. +++ATH0

Hopefully the real ARPANET was a bit more scalable by oravecz · 2011-05-13 15:09 · Score: 2

operator: Slashdotted..367 users, holy shit

And just like that, the Internet is dead

Nicely done! by Tony+Isaac · 2011-05-13 15:12 · Score: 2

Very nice reproduction, it's scary that I could actually get around on it. I just had to see if I could still write an old-fashioned BASIC program. Worked like a charm.

In those days, it was just us nerds who used computers. We just HAD to show everybody our little secret, didn't we! Now EVERYBODY's on the Internet!

Re:Nicely done! by Opportunist · 2011-05-13 21:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

It's pretty much the sad story I love to tell, and since you asked for it (or at least I'll pretend you did), so you now get to hear it.
'twas the age when life was good for geeks. Universities built us a huge, world spanning network and we loved what we saw. We went and built ourselves a cute garden, where we made our claims and planted wonderful flowers and trees to enjoy, no need for fences or barbed wire because, hey, we WANTED to invite each other over to have a look at what we did with our little turf on the 'net. Come in, and if you enjoy my creation, here's a sapling for you to plant in your garden, no worries, it's free. Sure, there was that occasional bully, but in general we were pretty nifty and knowledgeable gardeners and knew how to beat them with our shovels and rakes. And the occasional gopher didn't bother us too much. Actually, it was a cute little critter! And of course, in some corners of our garden, we planted our special herbs and spices, complete with a camo net. Sure, everyone knew what's growing there but hey, nobody really cared. And if you needed some to relax, just go and take some, there's plenty.
We looked at what we built and said that it's beautiful, too beautiful to be just for us, we wanted the world to participate and enjoy that beauty too! We decided it would be unfair to keep the others, who are no gardeners, out of it. After all, you don't need to be a gardener to enjoy the sight, sound and smell of our creations, these people, too, should enjoy our roses and relax in the shadows of our trees. We went and built paths through our garden, we cut bushes and made it pleasurable and non-intimidating even to those that were kinda wary of this "jungle". We created safe roads for them so they don't have to climb over bushes but so they could see all there is for them to see. We probably shouldn't have shown them the field with the camo net, but hey, they too wanted some weed, and it just wouldn't have been fair to keep it away from them. Yeah, they just took and didn't plant, but hey, there was plenty to go about. And those that were too stupid to stay on the path or too eager to be troublemakers were even easier to deal with than those gardeners that did the same, since these people were even more clueless.
The whole mess started to fall down on us when two things happened. Once, some of those idiots had to brag about our camo patches and how they got some really good dope for free in here. That's when the real world started to muscle in and tell us that we can't do that. Ok, we rebuilt it, made the herb fields smaller and less obvious, but sadly we also made the mistake to tell everyone how to still get there. Talk about learning from a mistake, but that's the geek, if he builds something nice, he thinks that everyone should benefit from it. Sadly, that's not the way most people think.
Especially not corporations, who first wondered where all their consumer sheeple went and, realizing that they went to our garden, decided that this cannot be. There is a place where sheeple flock to, run by technically and not legally inclined people? Their appetite for our nice little garden awoke. They came with big building machines, evicted some of us on the pretense that they now own our turf and build some amusement park on it, fenced off and only accepting those that paid their fee. We looked at it with contempt, since it violated everything we wanted from our garden. You couldn't even go there and take a sapling from their trees, they'd rather uproot and destroy it rather than giving it to you, anathema to the geek ideals. Worse, they took your saplings, grew them and then called the park cops, claiming that you stole your tree from them, not the other way 'round.
More and more of them came, and less and less we could build our gardens the way we wanted to. Worse, often enough, we couldn't even build our gardens at all anymore. We were swindled out of our turfs, and better not even dream about building a camo patch, the park rangers are sniffing them out faster than you could grow them.
I think it's time to move on and build a new garden. And this time, we should maybe not let anyone in but people we know.

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We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Re:Nicely done! by Reservoir+Penguin · 2011-05-14 00:22 · Score: 2

I agree the stupid sheeple, drones and plankton have invaded our sacred space, anything from internet to Unix (Ubuntu) became infected with their stink.
Just yesterday I was musing about the need to create new application protocol, possibly with a Lisp based text interface, with no Flash, JS, ads, ecommerce, sort of like hypertext vector Fidonet.

--
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Re:Nicely done! by DerekLyons · 2011-05-14 03:47 · Score: 2

Universities built us a huge, world spanning network and we loved what we saw. We went and built ourselves a cute garden, where we made our claims and planted wonderful flowers and trees to enjoy, no need for fences or barbed wire because, hey, we WANTED to invite each other over to have a look at what we did with our little turf on the 'net.
And that's where your fantasy diverges from reality - and you don't even realize it. They built that network for *their* purposes, not yours. You forgot that the ground you planted the gardens on wasn't yours in the first place.

Found myself! by Anonymous Coward · 2011-05-13 15:27 · Score: 3, Funny

If I could only get a message through to my past self....

I think it would be:

"Forget the Amiga and Commodore! Buy all Apple stock you can! Hold through the lows! Sell just before the Mayan calendar ends!"

I miss Usenet the most. by taxman_10m · 2011-05-13 15:31 · Score: 2

Please, someone recreate the golden days.

Re:I miss Usenet the most. by bitMonster · 2011-05-13 16:27 · Score: 3, Insightful

Me, too. God, these web forums are awful. Including this one.
Re:I miss Usenet the most. by joh · 2011-05-13 20:09 · Score: 2

The Usenet is still there, nothing has changed. Just a lack of users, so get an account somewhere (news.eternal-september.org maybe) and help to get it back up...
Re:I miss Usenet the most. by devphaeton · 2011-05-14 05:34 · Score: 2

I used to say that google's caching of Usenet was a great service to all of mankind.
Now I really wish they hadn't. The ability to dig through the archives (from a historical standpoint) is amazing, but what "google groups" has been doing to Usenet in the present is... sad.

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do() || do_not(); // try();

Simpler by bragr · 2011-05-13 15:32 · Score: 4, Insightful

I like the days of yore better. Computers were simpler then. The software, the hardware, the protocols, all of it.

Back then it was possible to understand everything that was going on in your system, and there is something very beautiful about that. You could know how every command worked and how it did it, down the the binary data it was sending down the serial port if you wanted. Now, even though I know what seems like an encyclopedic amount of information about computers, there are large gaps in my knowledge where I either know nothing or I have only a general idea of whats going on.

Then again I can now play Angry Birds on Chrome so that kinda sooths the nostalgia.

Re:Simpler by hawguy · 2011-05-13 16:05 · Score: 3, Interesting

And a bit farther back it was possible to fix a computer yourself (*really* fix it, not just swap out a CPU or motherboard) - I remember helping to troubleshoot an old DEC PDP-10 (still alive way after its time) with a voltmeter - much of the logic was on wirewrapped cards. You could see the bug fixes because they were in different colored wires. I even had to enter the bootloader on the front panel register switches (just enough to get it to read the rest of the code from the paper tape reader).
Re:Simpler by scsirob · 2011-05-13 20:29 · Score: 4, Interesting

You are right, the tools have become a lot more powerful, and you do not have to dive into the nitty-gritty details anymore to get something done quickly.
However, there's a few downsides as well. My kids (lawn, get off, yeah yeah..) are interested in computers but simply cannot appreciate what goes on under the hood. They have never heard of accumulators, shift registers and carry flags. These same kids will have to advance the technology in a few years time, when they are in R&D labs. I can't imagine they do a good job at making optimal use of the resources that they will have at their disposal by then, simply because they do not understand what goes on inside.
The tools make it easy, but they cause lots of bloat. When I built my own CP/M computer, a buddy designed a graphics card for it and wrote some basic CAD software in the 32K RAM we had. I designed a mouse circuit for it and wrote a mouse driver in about 50 bytes or so. It truly disgusts me when today I buy a mouse and it comes with a 20 Megabyte driver set. That's more than the entire operating system 15 years ago. What is so bloody special about a mouse that it needs 20 million bytes of instructions to function? Left, right, up down, button 1,2,3 up and down. What else??
No-one cares about this anymore. A waste of resources. What a shame.

--
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Re:Simpler by svick · 2011-05-13 22:27 · Score: 4, Insightful

I think what we had before was a waste of a much worse kind - waste of human resources. If all programming required rewiring hardware, we wouldn't have all the amazing things we have today, including Internet, the Linux community, iPad or C#. So, yeah, it's a waste, but I think it's much better to waste few cycles for garbage collection that to waste few hours debugging access violation problem.

Re:Slashdotted by BertieBaggio · 2011-05-13 15:51 · Score: 2

Is that how you normally fix a slashdotting?

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If all you have is a grenade, pretty soon every problem looks like a foxhole -- MightyYar

Telnet alternative by XSpud · 2011-05-13 15:53 · Score: 2

I just got this message when logged in: "operator: direct telnet telehack.com will be faster than the web interface"

Re:Nostalgia never made sense to me by syousef · 2011-05-13 15:54 · Score: 2, Insightful

I think the point is, but may be wrong, is that now it is ubiquitous, whereas before it was something a person wanted or was drawn to do. Computing today is kinda lame really, because it isn't exclusive at all. It gets old, invasive, and yes all over the place. But has it solved any of the worlds problems? *looks around*... we still have plenty. *goes back into cave*

Well all I know is that growing up I couldn't talk to people from around the world for free, and if I wanted information I was limited to my local library if and when I could get there. If I was sick I relied on the rubbish doctors in my neighborhood to diagnose and treat me. If I wanted to do real science I had to make it my career, where now I can run all manner of science and math apps. If I wanted music I had to go and physically purchase it. If I wanted to compare prices it would take hours. Nothing was searchable without great effort!

We'll always have lots of problems, but computers sure have solved SOME of mine. Computing is only lame if you use it for lame things.

As for it not being exclusive, that's only a problem if you're an elitist. And besides there are plenty of non-mainstream geeky computer endevours that are very exclusive. Have you hacked a LInux kernel?

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These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer

Me too. It makes me realize by aussersterne · 2011-05-13 15:57 · Score: 2

that I am no longer of the "current technological generation" but am in fact a couple generations back.

Yes, I remember updating my office location, hours, and plan for finger-ers and actually miss that—somehow it all felt so much more personal to me than Facebook does today. That is, I suppose, how you know that time has passed you buy.

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STOP . AMERICA . NOW

Re:Nostalgia never made sense to me by arth1 · 2011-05-13 16:25 · Score: 2

You may find a BBS, but you won't find the people you talked to.
It's not the technology that has changed the most, but the users.
If you want nostalgia and nerd talk, go to /., before the designers ruin it with video and ajax, driving the old school nerds away.

What's it supposed to be? by Animats · 2011-05-13 16:51 · Score: 2

I'm not sure what 80s system it's supposed to be emulating. It's not a BBS. It's not TOPS-20. It's not VMS. It's not SAIL. It's not ITS. It's not an ARPANET TAC. It's not Multics. It's not UNET on UNIX.

Re:What's it supposed to be? by hey+hey+hey · 2011-05-13 17:56 · Score: 2

I'm not sure what 80s system it's supposed to be emulating. .
Seems kinda TOPS/10 to me.

Not Quite by hduff · 2011-05-13 16:52 · Score: 2

I had an amber monitor . . .

--
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert

Re:Not Quite by blind+biker · 2011-05-13 19:16 · Score: 2

Haha, yeah, our computer classrooms were all equipped with amber VT terminals. Some were actually white, but not one, as far as I can remember, was green phosphorus.
And we had... hundreds of these terminals, all connected to some powerful (for the time) Sun server. I never had as much fun on the internet, as back then. It was all mesmerizing. And people were genuinely excited and glad to connect across the world. Now we are all so fucking jaded.

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"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.

You had to be there by inKubus · 2011-05-13 17:02 · Score: 2

I think you had to be there, before the time of Google and instant information, to truely appreciate the challenges and wonderful triumphs that were possible. And of course, being in a community with ONLY the top 1 or 2 million in intelligence was nice also. It was a magical time and now it's just noise. Sure there's some smart kids and I really like the whole "being nice is cool" thing, ala reddit, and etc. but I've seen it a million times: once everyone is doing it, it's not cool anymore. But I think this is a time when the roots of tech, the old timers, really need to step up and make sure this thing lasts in the true spirit of what we intended it to be. It truely is a new form of freedom, but it could easily be the makings of a new form of slavery as well. We need to remember that the net is about communitity, not a group of people or a city but this idea that everyone has something to contribute and that the easier it is to contribute, and the more that is contributed, be it good, bad, valuable or worthless, makes it more valuable. The fact that we are greater than the sum of our parts, really just bits of electricity in the world's largest circuit. Let's make sure that free flow is ALWAYS here.

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Cool! Amazing Toys.

Re:Nostalgia never made sense to me by reiisi · 2011-05-13 18:42 · Score: 2

The only thing the computer has done, the way we use it, is to make it quicker to come to the wrong conclusions.

Some people use the computer to make it easier to back up and try a new path having once come to the wrong end-point. That's a real improvement.

But it also makes it easier to just blindly try more wrong paths. Computers induce a lot of churn into our daily lives. I guess that's different. I'm still not convinced it's substantive. Too many of the important problems have too many paths to try, so many that you're probably going to die before you hit a right solution. And if you get used to the churn, I think you lose the ability to recognize a right path, so you often find yourself having backed off a real solution and started on a new wrong one, and by the time you can get back to what was a right path, well, you've changed, and the network has changed.

I've noticed that my cell phone has more storage and more computing power than the Univac 1100 that we used at college. More even than the Sun workstations I used at the university. Shoot, I have a couple of AT&T 7100s or whatever those 68010-based Unix workstations were called stored in a basement somewhere in the States, half a meg of RAM and 20M of hard disk. The OS floppies are still there, I think.

My cell phone has 64M or RAM, a full gig of flash RAM for persistent store. The display has a bit fewer pixels. Or does it? The keyboard, well, okay, that's a loss. Network connectivity? No ethernet, but it is connected to telephone network.

And the OS is a derivative of Linux that Docomo (and NTT) refuse to acknowledge, much less live up to the license requirements of letting me access it, so I can't run dc (or bc) or vi on it.

I want a portable Unix workstation the size of a pocket calculator. I know it could be done.

Nostalgia makes sense to me.

--
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.

Re:Nostalgia never made sense to me by Lemmy+Caution · 2011-05-13 19:18 · Score: 2

Nostalgia is about mortality. Those of us who remember those times also are aware that we were 20 years younger then. Technology may develop indefinitely, but we will pass on. Those technologies of the past bring us back, ultimately, to a time 20 years farther away from our own deaths.

Vuja De by Tablizer · 2011-05-13 19:55 · Score: 3, Funny

My God, it's Craigslist with Night Mode on.

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Table-ized A.I.

Re:Hilarious by Opportunist · 2011-05-13 21:09 · Score: 2

367 users? OMFG, everyone on the arpanet is on my server!

--
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.

Re:Nostalgia never made sense to me by qubezz · 2011-05-13 21:39 · Score: 2

Just watched the linked video to the end, it's awesome to see SMS and Internet chat shorthand like "brb", "LOL", and smileys being used in chat rooms 22 years ago. Take that you whippersnappers! ;)

Can i download a VM by nurb432 · 2011-05-14 02:55 · Score: 2

Considering the minimal resources required to reproduce this, any chance this is running on a VM or something that we could 'take home' as our very own? ( for when this fades into the abyss of time and memory )

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---- Booth was a patriot ----

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Telehack Re-Creates the Internet of 25 Years Ago

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