Slashdot Mirror
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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+.