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Online Services: The Internet Before the Internet
jfruh writes "The Slashdot readership is probably split pretty evenly into two groups. There are those for whom full-on Internet access has been available for their entire computer-using lives, and then there are those who wanted to use the Net from home before 1991, and who therefore had to use a BBS or an online service. Here's a tour of some of these services, including Prodigy, Compuserve, and of course AOL. This should be a nostalgic trip for the oldsters among us, and a history lesson for Gen Y readers."
Back in time my dad didn't give me internet access, so I had to resort to offline things. However, that was all fine because I used to learn a lot from it. I used to do programming for a long time before Internet, and I am actually glad I did. It feels like the current generation is too obscured with useless things and even new programmers copy paste their code from searches performed on Google. It hardly teaches you anything. I used to read programming books and manuals that came with the tools. I actually had to walk to my friends place to download the latest XNA and Visual Studio. Now kids get it too easily. However, I do find my new internet access fascinating. My dad and I had a discussion and he gave me access. It gives a little nostalgic tear on my eye when I first time logged in to the Internet and made Facebook account so that I could chat with my friends. Good times there, folks.
http://www.itworld.com/print/264694
Third group: Those who had Apple II or C64 or TRS-80 or some such.
Fourth (my) group: Those who carried boxes of punch cards across campus.
It's you.
An oldster is anyone older then roughly 30 (in the context of the article). People who can remember using 14.4 and/or slower modems, and playing things like LORD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_Red_Dragon
They're like hipsters but they've had hip replacements so they prefer a non-hip term.
...well, my dad did. So, I had the experience of playing the "Star Trek" game on a printing terminal connected via an acoustic coupler. It was the Arpanet back then, and not the Internet, and we wore an onion on our belt, a big yellow one, because that was the style.
What was I saying? Oh, right, "full on" internet access wasn't so good in the days before BBSing was popular.
Do I Do I See See Everything Everything Twice Twice?
NoNoobob.
Some of us were on BITNET.
And running one was an honor. Before the internet took away the sysops, each man or woman was king of their own castle, linked only by the roads of the mail networks. And I'm barely Gen X at 34.
Internet reminisces about YOU!
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
I ran one, great times. Blazing 300 baud modem. By the time I was done we were up to 56K. I could probably still tell you the connection speed based on the squawks during the initial connection session.
I'm still very nostalgic about those times as I was part of them, and contributed to them. My BBS was free, and wasn't half bad. Of course Fido Net really gave you that sense of being in communication with the rest of the world. Amazing stuff!
I remember when America Online was a BBS run by Rocky Rawlins in Birmingham, AL. He sold the name to some unheard of upstart company who offered him stock instead of cash. He took the $15k in cash. Oops.
I remember the daily ritual of signing on to Compuserve to get the daily email from our customers in Europe, as well as telex orders.
It was pretty much useless as far as I can recall, but it was a boat load cheaper than phone calls for tech support issues.
When we first started, there was just beginning to be interconnection between Compuserve and a few other providers. Customers would send us Compuserve mails to let us know they were having problems dialing into our BBS system from India, and Britain.
The internet came along in our part of the hinterlands, and we hopped on that as fast as possible. We were only too happy to be free of these other services. Even if Email did take a day to arrive (I kid you not, it took a day to get an email from India, and it was routed through the most amazing places).
So, no, not nostalgic. Nightmare perhaps. Trying to type an answer to a tech support question into the glass tty screen with the minute meter clicking in your head, because copy/paste hadn't really been worked out yet. Being charged by the message length!! Arrrggggh.
No thank you. I'm not taking the tour.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The Internet was available before 91 on dial-up, at least if you were a college student. There just wasn't as much on it then, and sometimes it was more likely you could reach your friends online on your local BBS. Heck, there wasn't even DNS, you had a phone book of IPs you entered into your hosts table.
But I bet the real Internet culture shock for Gen X/Y is probably that they don't remember a time before commercial content or business activity was allowed on the Internet. It wasn't just that there wasn't a web and e-commerce hadn't taken off, it was freakin' prohibited.
I used it back in the day, first in DOS on a 2400baud, then eventually in windows on a blazing fast 14.4. Yeah, a lot of it wasn't that great (especially when they charged per message for email - even to for messages to other prodigy members) but it was pretty good in some ways for the time.
My question though is this - does anyone else remember the games they had on there? I seem to recall a D&D based game on there, but I can't seem to find anything on it any more. I would have thought that someone else would have played it. I thought it was called Neverwinter Knights (which of course is a current name for a D&D game) but I could be wrong on that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
14.4?
Whipersnapper! Get off my lawn.
We started at 300 baud, and were lucky to get that. The long period of dead traffic right in the middle of the message taunted you to hang up and dial again, only to have it sputter out another few characters.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The posted article has too many false assumptions in it to be anything like reasonable. It's trying to establish a false dichotomy. I've been on the Internet since the early 80s -- essentially, all my computing life -- and certainly never resorted to silly BBS systems or AOL/Prodigy abominations. Bletch!
Sure, there were times I had to dial into a terminal server, but I still connected directly to a nice friendly BSD Unix system on the real Internet. The firstish of which was what became known as uwvax.cs.wisc.edu. Yes, we had an ARPANET IMP. Pesky little thing it was, too.
What category then do I fall into? Neither of the two misleadingly presented ones from the original article, that's for certain. The question is: how many others were in my camp? Pretty obviously the kinderwriter of the article never thought of people like us.
Before 1996 and my family's acquisition of dialup internet (at $0.50 an hour!) my parents had access to Compuserve for several years. I remember using it many times on a 14.4K modem, eventually upgrading to a 28.8K as Compuserve began enabling internet access over their dialup connections.
Their services were replaced rapidly, even AOL with their numerous exclusives couldn't stave off the inevitable dominance (and infinitely greater flexibility) of the internet.
does anyone remember The Source? Where Ilearned about archie, gopher, telnet,finger,who, ftp and the like. I remember the first time I connected I went exploring on the source and realized that I was connecting to computers all over the world.
Egads, I'm not even an oldster, they're too young! I had to follow the link to remember a mention of LORD. And 14.4 modems were the 3rd or 4th upgrade for me, after having the wonderful experience of an new 300 baud modem. That would be after coding my first game, in assembly, on an Atari 800. We played things like Zork, Wizardry, Hack, and, heck, there was some star based game on DECs we used to play, although the name escapes me now. For that matter, there were an entire sequence of very popular Infocom games (I admit I still have them in a box upstairs) that I played, and the original D&D games in amazing 2 bit color (ok, perhaps only my graphics card was monochrome, I don't recall) But I do recall FIDONET as a new wondrous thing (hey, if we're mentioning BBS's, might as well mention the first networked system) OK, nostalgia satisfied, time to go back to my VCR and reel to reel.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
AppleCat FTW. If you had the special daughterboard AND you were calling another AppleCat owner, you could get 1200 baud!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I think I fit in with a lot of 20-something /.ers. Being born in the mid-80s, I remember a time before internet access was widely available, but I was also too young to ever get involved in the BBS scene, and my first internet experience was web access via lynx and a library account (although my first home access was ...AOL [briefly] a few years later).
An oldster is anyone older then roughly 30 (in the context of the article). People who can remember using 14.4 and/or slower modems, and playing things like LORD.
No, you mean rogue(6), whose magic word was Elbereth . My fingers have the movements in muscle memory. Something about 100,000 lines of C code written in vi does that to a kid. Or maybe the 10,000 games of rogue(6). Prolly both.
Earlier still was ADVENT, whose magic word was xyzzy . Whole 'nother country, that.
ISCABBS was where I spent a lot of time, pre-ISP, pre-browser.
And it still exists and yes, I still visit on a regular basis.
bbs.iscabbs.com (that's telnet to get there, kids!).
The good old days of 600+ simultaneous online users. Ah!
Today's forums are a lot harder to read.
Anything is possible given time and money.
There seems to be a general assumption by many that the internet was predestined to win out over these other pre-existing nets.
It wasn't.
Things like the much derided Al Gore 'invention of the internet' - he was instrumental in securing some funding for non-educational use.
If the existing services that were taking off when the internet came along from behind had gotten their acts together - and gotten for example inter-provider mail working, the internet in its present form may not have happened.
It could so easily have been that if you wanted to make a page to advertise your business, it wasn't a case of simply sign up to one of the many thousands of hosting providers - but three or four large companies dominate.
Next month: The later years; running an ISDN connection to PSInet, and the class B address blocks they liked to give out when you joined their service.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Quantum Computer Services (aka QuantumLink, which was basically AOL for Commodore 64 users... later they had AppleLink for Apples).
Other early services I remember:
The Source (later merged with CompuServe)
Portal (semi-popular Unix accounts with some Internet access)
Galaxy BBS ... a large PC-based BBS in New Mexico trying to be CompuServe
Fidonet and Citadel networked BBSs
That 30 years figure must be outdated!
Oldsters are always at least 15 years older than I am.
I see this very early entry to the public Internet is sadly missing from the article. CFN (https://wiki.case.edu/Cleveland_Freenet) provided message boards, IRC, USENet, MUDs/MOOs, and just about every other service provided by the fledgling Internet was there, including email (with gateways to FIDO, CIS, and a few others), to anybody with a modem, for free. The FreePort software was also published under (I believe) a 4-clause BSD license, giving rise to myriad offspring, some of which might still be around (though hopefully not running FreePort anymore).
I suspect that one of these choices is incorrect. Correct.
Cheers to you sir.
I bow to ur wisdom
I had a friend who couldn't stop calling it "computer serve" instead of "Compuserve." But oh well.
I started personally in 1990 or 1991 with Prodigy- DXTH23B, here. It was on a 286/12 with 1MB RAM and an incredibly big 60MB hard drive. I even had VGA! I installed the modem myself, at 14 years old. I was so nervous because I didn't want to break our computer, that I was shaking! I got the modem in and then learned about IRQ's and COM ports. Those were the days! I remember being so excited when I could message my friends who used AOL and it didn't cost extra.
I remember being a young teenager asking a million questions about computers etc and getting great, solid answers. The SNR was much better back then.
Eventually I moved to AOL and BBS'ing. I was the first in my area to have 28.8kbps. I got them before they were released to the public through a friend who ran a warez bbs. The price was amazing, and in retrospect it probably fell off the back of a truck.
I even had a BBS of my own for about a week. I had my 486 all set up on Renegade IIRC. I even got the newspaper to print the number in the "technology" page on Mondays. And, they printed the wrong number. One person figured it out and called in. I gave up on BBS's, the Internet was taking off and I haven't looked back.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
That's nothing. Back in the day, we had to get our internet via semaphore flags. One person would work the computer and another would be the spotter, using a pair of binoculars. It would take all day just to draw the screen,
You are welcome on my lawn.
Travel abroad!! I can't tell you how much is sucks to be traveling in a remote place in India right now and read this article. I'm from the States and have great cable ISP at home. For the past month of traveling, I've had to rely upon my awesome Android rooted phone as a mifi with a SIM card for India. I"m lucky to get up to 30kbps, but most of the time hang around 2 or 3 (in between the long 0kbps). Why talk about how slow things are, go experience it again like me!! :) You'll be glad you did...helps you appreciate even more what we have.
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
I used Delphi and ran a BBS
That's nothing. My first monitor was a cave wall.
I would sit with my back to the cave's opening and watch the shadows cast upon the inside wall.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Most people I knew didn't have any kind of online service in the mid-80s. It wasn't until 1987 that I met a friend who's dad had it and used it sparingly. CompuServe was just getting started and the ads looked cool in Compute! magazine but there was no way I wouldn't have been able to talk my parents into buying a modem after already talking them into the Commodore 64. One has to remember, a Commodore 64 and 1541 disk drive would set you back about $450. Adjusting for inflation, in today's dollars, that's roughly $867! Add to that, the only way one could access it would be through the phone lines - long distance - around 50 cents/min back then.
So, we bought blank floppies and used Fast Hack'em to copy warez. Hell yeah, those were the days.
I collect old computer ads. Remember 10 MB hard drives selling for $3400? You could buy a car for that.
Wasn't it Load "$",8,1 ?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
plugh.
You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
There is Microsoft here.
Until this past Tuesday, that was the speed I was stuck at. Now I'm flying @ 2.5. Yay.
I've got 101 mod points and you can't have them!
I've been on COMPUSERVE and Genie at 300 Baud. I wrote my own BBS software for the C64 (and I still have the Source code and Data files!), then I wrote one for the Atari ST. Somewhere around 1990 I got on the Internet. That was a PITA back then... having to install software in Windows just to connect.
I miss those days a little, except for the speed. I'll take my 60Mbit Connection over 300 Baud any day :)
Long Live the Punter Protocol! Transferring 170K in 30 minutes!
Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
The REAL prototype for today's Internet can be found on the single-line, amateur, free Bulletin Board Systems of that era. You won't find anything comparable to the steaming, frothing orgy of human id we have today in the archives of those online services. European software piracy boards? Check. White supremacists? Check. Crappy low-fi porn? Check. Illegal seizures by federal authorities? Check. The hijacking of discussions by socially maladjusted teenage boys? Check? The ham radio loving middle-aged pedos who stalked them? Check.
The first teacher I ever had who used email was my freshman HS algebra teacher. She used Compuserve so her email address was some sort of random number sequence. Prodigy and AOL were far superior because they encouraged you to pick a goofy nickname to use while online - your screen name. Because, hey, who knew this internet thing would become so serious?
People are still using stupid screen names for primary email. I get to see a lot as a teacher. There are too many female students out there, for example, with emails including some variation on "juicy". My all time favorite, though, was a student whose email address was "SmurfKiller" with some additional numbers. There must be a lot of smurf killers out there . . .
Your post reminds me that when I first had real Internet, I was on local BBSs, too, and they were more fun. At least until MUDs came along. I think that was what really won me over, as much as I hate to admit it. And then I guess they found a way to make the Internet profitable, so it became self-sustaining.
Makes me wonder, what did it take to win other people over to the Internet from what you had before?
purchased for my C-64 in about 1983-84 when I was 12 or 13.
... living in Canada at the time meant long distance charges for connecting to the servers in the US.
:(
... but, thankfully, not the C-64. BASIC and the Zork series kept me occupied enough until they gave it back to me. Except when I got it back my allowance didn't go too far with the long distance charges. Something like 2 or 3 hours a month, as I remember.
Except
When my parents got the bill for my "free" service they took away the modem
I'm 32. That's not old.
"We used to dream of living in the corridor.... It would have been a palace to us!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lb-2VaJYPw
Load "*",8,1 is what you are thinking. The 8 was the drive number, the 1 was binary vs 0 or blank as text. If you tried to load the directory in binary, you'd get a bunch of gibberish. Wow, I can't believe I remember all this.
Nope. It was LOAD"*",8,1 to load the most recently loaded file (or on first load, the first file on disk) at it's original load address. The reason you have to leave the ,1 off when fetching a directory with $ was that for backwards compatibility and code re-use, the drive sent a load address of $0401. This was fine on the PET and on a Vic-20 expanded with 3K RAM, but on the C64 $0400-$07FF is by default screen memory, and so LOAD "$",8,1 on a C64 will display the raw bytes as if it were screen code, which is incorrect. Leaving off the ,1 forces C64 BASIC to load it to normal BASIC RAM (located at $0801), so that you can then LIST it like a BASIC program.
FC Closer
Really primitive - senior academic staff only - research stuff on a modem the size of a briefcase with speeds to slow to remember - 13 colleges across an area larger than Texas - Ontario, Canada. Community Colleges. Fun. But not practical for anything but academic navel gazing. This was about the time of the TRS80 but we used dumb terminals for commucation.
The truly loyal subject will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures
For us, this was most practical of the various kinds of Internet connectivity available in those days. It "only" did email--but, jesus--what a productivity boost. Our Fedex bill dropped like a stone.
I still remember how proud I was when I bought my first 300 baud modem
That thing did cost me an arm and a leg - and boy - I thought 300 baud was fast !!
Then they upped the speed, and I had to chop off another arm and another leg to get a "new" modem
Then they upped the speed again --- guess what, I chopped off yet-another-arm and yet-another-leg to pay for that too !!
Throughout all these years, I have lost count of how many arms and legs I'd to trade in for those modems
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We had lost of internet well before 1990 - as a software development resource, not the web. Usenet was mentioned, and if you could grab sources mailorder and compile (Austin Code Works!) for PCPIP from CMU, ftp and gnu tools you could find a gateway somewhere dialup for your home PC-AT.
You could also send off for tapes of archives of usenet, cant recall but those guys in Falls Church VA...
we had PC unix too, Interactive was sysV.
You could send off for tapes too to all the universities, I got TeX that way and X11 from MIT.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon on the freeway, loaded with mag tape.
This was the main online service I used for 10 years. Dumped it when AOL bought them. First connected with a manual 300 baud modem I built from spare parts. Still have the modem. Fun days.
..... we ran back and forth screaming in binary.
Ohhh a nostalgia trip. This makes me feel like singing. Like its back in the day. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0HKHbJceAw
I remember interactive porn stories on the local BBS, and how much faster they loaded when I went to 14,400 (from 2400, I think I had 300 for a bit before that). I remember the first porn picture I ever DLed, "Bed post" was it's title, hot blond, big boobs and a properly sized bedpost....
I remember my friend playing "Empire" on the Evergreen State Colleges mainframe, apparently created at TESC. He would log in with 300 baud modem. Really the first MMOG (or MOG anyway). He was known as "Jen the blood thirsty maniac" (Yes his name is Jen, short for Jenison) Amazingly fun game to watch.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
actually no one says that.
TRADEWARS!!! God I loved that game... You forgot Solar Realms Elite, the Pit, and Risk... door games on BBSes were the bomb for no-car, no-girlfriend, no-decent-job teenagers with C-64's :)
Of course if I hadn't spent all that money on my Anchor Automation 1200baud modem, I'd probably have had a car. :) Or access to one. By the time I could afford a car and gasoline too, I was rummaging through the seat cushions of mom and Dad's car for coinage so I could either play some Gauntlet at the Putt-Putt or get a regular taco and a cup of Ice at Taco Smell. :)
Shit, my three buds and I (perfect for a tradewars corporation "Rape and Pillage Corp"!!!) Me (goattee), Chad (The Mountain of Flesh), Anthony (Mucus) and Mike (who couldn't think of a good nickname for himself because he was a pussy...) would pitch in and eat cheap tacos or pizza while trying to maximize our evil standing in three or four door games. :) I lost touch with them all when I moved out west, and to this day, I can still remember the 3x5 card ring binder we used to keep track of trade routes in our various games of Tradewars. We'd also store Dungeon Master spell combinations on the backs of the cards we put our tradewars info on... (Zo Kath Ra!) :)
Ahhhhhhhh memories. :) Kids today don't know what fun that was... and here I am sounding like my dad... .heheh.
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
I quickly spent most of my time on GEnie. I think their leadership can be really proud of themselves. Like the article alludes to, it was clear that GE itself didn't really give a crap. It was just a way to pay for their computers in the off-hours. Despite what it must have been like working within that environment, somehow the GEnie team managed to create a really nice and competitive system. Didn't make it to '99 but I hung on to their text service longer than I should have into the Mosaic and early Netscape era.
How many times are you going to reply with this silly joke? That's the problem with some of us oldsters. We don't realize when we are not funny and just annoying?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
microsoft? try cpm/mpm
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Excuse me, Mary Sunshine, but this was my first time.
And who appointed you the joke police? I was getting +5 Funny mods when you were still jerking off to the Power Puff girls.
You are welcome on my lawn.
They used to give out starter snap packs (username and password) good for a 1 hr free trial. A friend of mine used to collect them and found they didn't kick you off at 1 hr. A snap pack was good for an 8 hr session as long as you didn't get disconnected. They then started requiring a CC number to use the free hour.. Bummer.
The truth shall set you free!
We started at 300 baud, and were lucky to get that. The long period of dead traffic right in the middle of the message taunted you to hang up and dial again, only to have it sputter out another few characters.
At my first real technical job - a summer internship at an engineering firm, actually - we had terminals that connected to the company's central computer (which sat in the same building) over either 150 or 300 baud lines IIRC. They put me to work doing some programming because none of the real engineers knew how - this was 1982, after all. If I typed fast enough, I could get ahead of the display.
Ah, the sweet, sweet glow of monochrome orange phosphor...
#DeleteChrome
We never had a 300 baud modem, thank god....my father worked for the local computer retailer, so we got the top of the line (Atari!) 1200 baud modem when it became available. Before that we'd go to the library to get on Cleveland Freenet (1988)....we still used it for a while after that with our own modem, but then we went with Delphi ($40 for 40 meg a month! Who would use 40MB a month!).
Ah, the good old days. It reminds me of the craziness with zmodem, ymodem-g, etc. Of course, those were the days when you would *really* consider whether you wanted to download something larger than 100KB (usually from umich...)
Started at 300 baud? Boy you were lucky!
My acoustic coupler could only get 110 baud and noticed this and AT&T wanted to charge me to upgrade to the digital ready line tariff rate (which happened to also bundle the new-fangled "touch-tone" dialing support). When AT&T was finally forced to let ordinary mortals attach other devices to their precious phone line, I bought myself a modular jack adapter, rewired the connection, and plugged in a non-acoustic modem...
Wow, that brings back memories...
That is all. Now get off my damned lawn.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
24 lines! chat!
And "trade wars".
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
But it was still such a step up from the older IP over smoke signals.
And it had the advantage of being immune to the early malware of some net.troll stoking the signal fires with poison ivy.
Semaphore flags? SEMAPHORE FLAGS? Wow, you younguns certainly had it easy. When I was growing up we had smoke signals, and when the wind blew the wrong direction we'd have to chase half-way around the world to establish a connection. It took months to simply write out a smiley face, and I'm still waiting for my "You've Got Mail" notice to arrive.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
BBC - BBS - The Documentary - Find it. It's really good. 8 episodes. Some of it is on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnSz-Hb9LQY
"I would sit with my back to the cave's opening and watch the shadows cast upon the inside wall."
And then that bastard Socrates stole the idea, and Plato wrote it up.
And I bet you didn't even get royalties.
"Full on" Internet was a rarity back then. Dedicated data lines were expensive. Most schools/companies had a LAN, and some servers which would occasionally dial out to neighbor Internet nodes with modems over phone lines to exchange files, mail, news, etc. in a quick data burst, thus minimizing long distance phone line usage costs. An email could take days, sometimes over a week to get to the other side of the world because each network hop in what is now traceroute could introduce a delay of a few hours.
This was in contrast to BBSes, which were basically user-to-server connections (with users eating the long distance fees if they wished to dial a non-local BBS). The Internet made intermittent server-to-server connections behind the scenes which asynchronously simulated long-distance user-to-user connections. If you cut your teeth on BBSes, it worked a lot like FidoNet eventually did.
Wasn't AOL reserved for the non-geeks who had trouble finding the power button?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
It's you.
How are you gentlemen?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I ran a 2-phone line BBS over 15 years ago before the internet was publicly available.
Huh? Fifteen years ago I was playing Quake CTF online with people all over the world. Your memory as to the state of the Internet in 1997 seems a bit hazy.
My first online experience was when I was 8 years old, using QuantiumLink on a Commodore 64 with a 1200 baud modem. Back then predators weren't really a problem online and people actually were friendly towards each other. Miss the old days.
You are prolly right.. let me see.. we got married in 1995.. and it was about 2 years before that.. so I guess it was 1993 or so.. dam time flies when youre having "fun".. holy crap.. I just realized thats almost 20 years ago..
And they're better left alone. Let's be careful with those rose tinted glasses. In terms of technology things sucked back then. Things are much better now. I'm old enough to remember 8" floppy disks and all I can say is "good riddance". I hated those BBSs. What a pain that was. And downloading files even with zmodem was so painfully slow.
I will admit however that I have never been able to find a suitable replacement for the cRPG forum on Compuserve or some of the usenet discussion groups. But pretty much everything else sucked. Technology is one of the few things in the world that get better with time.
One thing that does seem to have changed for the worse however is the discussion level in forums. I remember discussion forums in the 90s as being a lot more polite and deep, with walls and walls of text and no one complaining about it and well thought out, intelligent replies. Nowadays if a message is too long to have fit in a cell phone text message it is considered a lengthy, impossible to read, wall of text.
Even on slashdot, I remember the discussions being better 10 years ago. There was a time when the majority of slashdotters even used Linux and knew how to write code. Maybe even assembly language (gasp). It used to also have a high percentage of Libertarians, which was interesting. Now Slashdot seems to be dominated by liberals, socialists, and greens. There was a time when any mention of Democrats vs Republicans was responded to with "What's the difference?". There are still replies like that but they are overwhelmed with hundreds of replies from genuine Democrats and Republicans bickering with each other about their petty differences.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
If you haven't watched BBS Documentary series, then do so!
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Those of us who grew up in areas where there was no electricity. Even in developed nations, electricity wasn't available in some country areas well into the 1960s. In my case, this was Northern Ireland, only a mile or two out from a small city.
I hated spending all day to send a message and then when I saw a smoke signal in response it said NAK.
This Wikipedia article shows the modem types and years released. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modem
The Wikipedia article lists the release years of modems conforming to various V.xx standards.
There were modems available that exceeded that timeline by quite a bit. Telebit made their TrailBlazer series that uses quite a different scheme to encode the data on the line from the ITU-T V series schemes. Telebit used what they called PEP which stood for Packetized Ensemble Protocol. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telebit#Models
They exceeded the speeds of the commonly available "Hays compatible" modems by a huge margin. PEP still works faster on very noisy phone lines then today's commonly available modems. In situations where a 56K modem will only hook up at 1200 baud the Telebits will generally connect at 9600+.
I still miss those pixelated 240x300 porn pics...
there was nothing better in '96!
This is a UDP joke, I don't care if you get it or not...
In late 1970, We were up in the hills of Berkeley, on a Data General Nova, which later got a HP2000B.
In the Easter vacation of 1972, we got to take home a ASR33, and wrote both a monopoly game, as well as roulette.
It used a Bell-75 acoustic coupler, with 35, 50 and a whopping 75 Baud. ( The ASR-33 was not much faster ).
On, and off for the next few years, we would go into random labs, and try the admin password, and they never changed it.
We wrote fake log in programs, and captured a lot of passwords.
into college, they had a HP2000C/F and I had the system *poned* in the first week.
In 1981, We had heard that Rogue was becoming popular, so we requested the source, and got it to compile, however, we struggled with bad terminal emulation, and had to customize our termcap file so the screen addressing would work. Once we got it to work, for the most part, we road tripped to Cambell hall at UCB and met up with the authors, Michael Toy, and Ken Arnold, who were answering questions from around the net about how to fix brain-dead terminal capability files. From Seer, we were on the net, and I spent a long week reading all of usenet. All 8000 posts if it. ( which is impossible today ). I also wrote the 24 hour FAQ. There were only about 4000 people on the whole internet.
We got to compile rogue on a IBM XT running Xenix-86, and for the most part it worked well, and a few systems later, it came with the system!
In early 1992, a service in San Francisco opened called The Little Garden, we signed up immediatly. They offered dial-up unix services, as well as mail connections to the local unix-boxen Seer.com and seeker.com, which were ! addresses from pyramid!systdon!seer, and we could, use a mail server to UUencode files and have them sent in parts, so we could UUEncode compressed sources, and capture them on the local system, and expand and compile them. We were on the Net, and heard both first hand of GNU, and much much later, a kid from Finland named... er.. Oh yea, Linus. We read his first post, and waited until someone had a working driver for a PC keyboard.
Somewhat later, we walked down to Walnut Creek CDROM, and got the whole shebang on a CD! Now... how to play it?
>No, you mean rogue(6), whose magic word was Elbereth .
A word of course that lived on in most of it's children -at least as far as the last proper nethack. I haven't played a proper roguelike since the nethack 3.14 was current so I honestly don't know if any of the later ones kept it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
We used to have to explain to customers that had run out to get 56K modems that the faster speeds would only work if their local phone company had switches that would support it. This was particularly rampant in the south. When 56K modems had started to become pretty common Bell South still didn't own a switch that would support the faster speeds. If I remember correctly there was a class action relating to either Bell South's part in it or maybe it was the retailers that were selling them.
Back in the days, you had online services offering messaging , games and information services - but only for those using the same company. Then you had the opportunity to use a gateway to this internet thingy.... Now we are getting back there, only the other way around: Facebook & Co are offering messaging, games and information services: But only to those signed up there. Facebook and the other social networking sites are the new online services, island that are completely isolated from each other.
Life is just nature's way of keeping meat fresh.
Online services aren't going away completely and in fact I'd say some companies want them to comeback. Microsoft is one of them. A child can easily grow up these days with the xbox being his interface to the net and unfortunately he'll only get a very filtered view of the world.
Nobody remembers the dawn of the freenets? The only time when it seemed the local libraries were ahead of their time. Some are still up: telnet.Aztecfreenet.org You can even browse the www in lynx (free proxy!)
Earlier still was ADVENT, whose magic word was xyzzy . Whole 'nother country, that.
The first time I played ADVENT was on an IBM-made 8080-based machine running (I think) CP/M. There was one big blue box for the motherboard and all of the daughterboards (CPU, RAM, disk controller, serial controller) and so, a similar sized one for the 8" floppy disk drives, and finally a terminal.
The second time I played ADVENT was on my Psion Series 3, a device with more RAM and more processing power, and a GUI, which fitted into my jacket pocket.
The best thing about most technology from the past is that we don't have to use it anymore.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It's like oldfag, except that people over the age of 12 who or who aren't on 4chan say it.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Today, you probably pay a flat fee for your Internet service and, for the most part, you don't pay anything for the various Web sites you visit or services you use. In the pre-CIX Internet days, it was an entirely different story.
Unless you were lucky enough to live close to an online service point of presence you had to use a dial-up modem to call up an X.25 packet switched wide area network (WAN). This connection service alone could cost anywhere from an affordable $1 an hour to a wallet busting $30 an hour, which you could then use to connect with an online service. The online service would also typically charge you a monthly fee plus an additional fee of $1 to $6 an hour. And you thought your ISP was expensive!
That's between $2 and $36 per hour. At the speeds mentioned, you could transfer 135,000 bytes per hour. That's $0.00237 to
$0.0427 per 160 bytes, which is much less than the $0.20 that we are charged today for text messaging without a plan. Incredible.
do {print "Mini-Geek Rules!\n";}
until ($TheEndOfTheWorld);
Is that we are slowly heading back to this direction where you get a limited amount of bandwidth to the point you are afraid to even read mail, and nearly all your content comes from directly your provider.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The Internet was advertised as "The Information Super Highway"?
lol
Back when I first got online we didn't even have ones and zeroes. We just had zeroes, and we liked it that way.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
To Stanford friends from the MIT A.I. lab.
My 1976 grad school email address is still active. It used telephone based internet uucp (unix-to-unix communications protocol). And it acquired a domain-name appendx in the mid 1980s.
Anyone who reads the list and says "What the fuck? A list of pre-Internet services that doesn't include Fidonet or the ad-hoc UUCP network that carried USENET?"
What an awful article!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Remember when l00t d00ds used AOL? Remember when Computer Shopper was an inch thick? Those were the days. When your porn came at less than 18 bps, when you saw hackers and you longed for hardware that powerful.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Yes, and I still know some people who pay for AOL, I ask them why because they have fiber or high speed of some sort and they say "for email"!!!!>!
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Here's one. Remember when you could ftp into an AOL node and grab an unshadowed userlist password as an anonymous user?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
I played that all the damn time on some Mac-hosted Hermes BBS in, oh, 1991 or so.
I wish I could remember ANY of the names of the BBSes I frequented back then...
With the first link, the chain is forged.
I'm not that old (26) but I remember the first time I went to the Internet through one of these AOL CDs. http://www.dialupsound.com/ It was working less than 10% of the time.
1. Ring the operator.
2. Tell her that you'll be using a modem for the next hour and please do not listen in or cut the connection.
3. Dial the BBS number
4. Logon, get the news, send msgs, play the game(s), log off and disconnect.
5. Hang up the modem.
Now do this for around 300 days per year and you'll be paying around $3000 in 1985 money for call charges because all BBS's were long distance.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
I was a little behind the times (born in 82) but I first played ADVENT (and a lot of other games from that era) in ~88 on a Modcomp ZORBA. Modcomp was a minicomputer manufacturer that was experimenting with portable PC's. All the versions of Zorba as far as I know ran CPM. I still have a few in storage that I need to bust out to see if I can get them working again.
I found a link to some kind of ZORBA fan page:
http://www.zorba.z80.de/
And here are some photos:
http://www.zorba.z80.de/photos.htm
In some ways, I long for my early internet experience. I miss easily finding and reading interesting scholarly articles, following hyperlinks that led to other interesting articles, and all on an amber terminal. I used to read for hours at a time. No pictures, no ads, no clutter, just text. Not that I'd want to go back to that - I do like images and video. But with no one worrying about how they were gonna make money off their "content" or their site, it seemed a nicer place, and I actually learned a lot. And if you're just downloading text, modem speed isn't a big issue.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I downloaded Linux when it was exactly 2 floppy disks (Ted Tso's boot/root set).
You lucky bastard. I got SLS to start out. That was entertaining! :-P
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
Still remember going online with the old 300 baud Vic Modem. It was cool, but the per-minute prices were outrageous and the fact that it moved so slowly you could almost feel the money leaving your pocket.
And "trade wars".
Ah yeah. I used to name my ship "Ferengi Hammer", just to mess with people running automated trading scripts (which would scan for the word "Ferengi" as a way to identify an encounter with one).
Is it an "internet" if you can communicate with foreign governments and Universities via modem?
In 1966 I was an operator on the AUTODIN system for the US Army. It was sort of like a WATS line. What we'd do is dial the node we wanted to communicate with, sync our ear-cup-cradle modems and transmit data through a device that looked like an IBM keypunch/reader machine that automatically fed Hollerith cards through the hopper, translated the holes into electronic signals and fed the signal over the modem. (Or received the signal and punched Hollerith cards.) The tricky part was sending encrypted data over cyphony systems; sometimes yo never knew if there were errors or not until the data was decrypted.
I also remember my computer being a "router" on the 'net using the "dot-bang" addressing scheme, but that came much later, after ARPANET had established itself as a part of the "internet". The big BBS systems back then were Gopher, Archie and Veronica, and usually hosted at some university.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
The Fort Worth Star Telegram hosted an online service beginning in 1982, per wikipedia. I had a lot of fun on that starting around 1984. I first got "online" with a Tandy CoCo and modem pack. I think it was 300 baud.
While I was in junior high and high school, my family connected to Prodigy with a 2400 baud modem, but not the variety with a phone craddle. My first real treat and taste of the internet was in college where I used Archie, Lynx, Gopher, newsgroups and Mosaic on Sparc workstations running Xwindows Motiff.
And besides, the thing about BIX was that you could have private forums like Commodore did with their developer support.
surely I'm not the only one who did a uucp newsfeed back in the day.. I think I used uunet and the psinet. Back then a full feed was like 2 or 3 MB per day..
We'd use early tools similar to John the Ripper to "decrypt" the password file and we'd post the username/password on newsgroups
AOL also supplied a 1-800 dialup number for those without local dialup access but they charged you more per hour onto your account, so you didn't rack up a phone bill but AOL would bill you per hour or minute at the time.
But ftp'ing into AOL nodes, grabbing the passwd file and decrypting most of the simple passwords with john the ripper you could then use the 1800 dialup as essentially free internet access.
That happened a ton, I remember I felt guilty myself, but I used it when I had lost my job and that net addiction kicked in :)
I could have simply been caught if they traced the phone number, but I was just lucky nothing ever happened
Depends on where you live. Some areas (such as the Upper Peninsula of Michigan) had no other dial-up connections that weren't long distance. Did phone support for Microsoft back when Win95 was new, we used to refer to it as 'Eh? Oh hell!'
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Uhh, or used it at college -- including via dial up to the college's mainframes? That's what I did (and of course used terminals at school too.. IIRC, tvi912c has the best keyboard, and adm3as sucked because they couldn't do vi right??)
When Rosa and I hit 20 years together we celebrated by hosting the Fiesta de la Candelaria in her neighborhood, which is where and how we met. You might consider sponsoring a big LAN party or something.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
By the time I moved to the state where I am now, many companies had internet access, and you could still patch in via Telebit, and there was this new thing called mosaic to play with.
Switching to contracting, and lacking a corporate connection, I signed up for this thing called AOL when it first came out. Ugh. When broadband first became available, I couldn't switch to it fast enough. And then a curious thing happened -- my friends who were on aol and earthlink and so forth, *stayed on* those services even after they got cable or dsl, in the mistaken belief that those services *were* the internet. No amount of convincing would alter that belief. It was bizarre. I guess it really does depend on what you grew up with.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
My first online experience dates back to using a brand new 300 baud modem for our Commodore 64 to connect to a BBS that I had sent away for information about called LoadStar. After a few months of playing around, my parents realized just how much their phone bill was getting hit for, and my few long distance calls to BBSs in California didn't help either ($2.99/minute long distance or something like that). I was grounded and the modem was put away for years. By the time we got a blazingly fast 486sx 33Mhz computer I was again allowed online, but only to call up nearby friends from high school for some games. then came Rise of the Triad and going to college and getting my first email address (still works too, 17 years later)!
Wow, I've been online longer than most college freshmen have been alive.
If I could only live my life with my threshold at 4...
... for a tree.
"...history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest." --Ghandi
...or maybe it was ARPANET back then, I don't remember. Anyway, I had an account through my employer (Boeing Computer Services, which no longer exists as a separate entity). My wife wanted a dishwasher. I told her she had married one, but she wanted to replace me. The predecessor to Craig's List back then was usenet, so I followed the postings in the wanted.wa (can't recall the exact name, but it was postings by would-be buyers/ sellers, with the .wa indicating the poster was located in Washington state). Sure enough, someone posted a used dishwasher for sale ad within a few miles of us. I contacted the seller, who was (obviously, back then) another computer geek, and we completed the transaction. I think our respective wives were amazed that this newfangled computer network was actually useful.
The dishwasher was portable, with wheels and a quick-connect to the water faucet (over the sink, so the waste water went down the drain). When we moved to Colombia a couple years later, we shipped it; when we left there, we sold it for roughly the original purchase cost + shipping. So somewhere in Colombia, there may still be a dishwasher bought from the Internet in 1986.
Between 1985 and 1994 I spent a bundle logging into CIS, either joining political and economics forums or playing multi-player games. I made new friends across the country and eventually met quite a few of them in person. I was a moderator on some of the forums and got free connect time when I was in each of those forums.
I tried AOL but it was too vanilla.
Then I got an internet connection and that was the end of my association with CompuServe.
Yes, the year was 1983/1984, and I tied up the phone line and the TV for hours. My dad hated me, My brother loved me because as a journalist he wanted me to download the Billboard Top 100 from this one BBS just as they came out. We would then turn around and send them out to Greece, to a Pop&Rock Music Magazine he was a foreign correspondent for.... We were so far ahead of our time, it wasn't even funny. I learned BASIC programming before anyone in my school. I practiced other computer languages. I wonder why I did not make a career of this computer thing...?!
Nothing to see here -- move along now...