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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That 30 years figure must be outdated!
Oldsters are always at least 15 years older than I am.
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.
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.
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.
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
which was basically AOL for Commodore 64 users
Actually, it was AOL, they just didn't know it yet.
Quantum Link (and Quantum Computer Services) changed its name to America Online around '91. If you were on Q-Link at the time, you might even remember the letters to users from Steve Case back when he was a Vice President during the Quantum days. Those notes from Steve Case seemed to start around the time the Quantum Link logo changed from the blue Futura-like text to the "Qlink" logo with the red 'Q' and black script 'link'. Who knew that in 1991 he'd become CEO and the company would change to become America Online?
Q-link had the first online graphical virtual casino I can think of (although it didn't deal with real money) as well as Club Caribe, which could probably be called the great grandfather of Second Life and its ilk.
I remember being amazed that I could buy plane tickets and other stuff like that through Q-link.
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
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 !
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you mean, today's normal and yesterday's normal are not the same. Back then, our view of the world was focused on people who could pass the computer usage test. Today, our view includes idiots that run unsecured computers, tweeters, likers, spammers, and those really icky predators. But that is all normal either way because that is what those 23 chromosome pairs can generate.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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+.
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.
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);
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.
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!