I’m interested in hearing about what the early days of the internet were like. I know I could just Google it, but I’d rather learn from people who actually lived through that time.
It took all night to download ascii porn over 300 baud modem.
You kids and your fancy modems. We had to make do with two Etch-A-Sketches connected with a string.
In 1997, I was interested in going to some minor league baseball games. I started with the internet. Many teams and some leagues did not even have their own website, much less a schedule of their games. So I did some phoning around, discovered that the Capital City Bombers played in Columbia SC (not Raleigh or Richmond or Annapolis or Dover), and I went to work. I had an account at one of those free webpage sites, and I compiled the first list ever on the www of all the teams and leagues in minor league baseball, and what city they played in, including the independent leagues.
In those days, an early version of Windows existed (95, I think), but I was still on text-only dialup with a freenet-based browser.
The early net was primarily bulletin boards that offered ftp downloads. You dialed into each bulletin board separately.
They had discussion threads, and lists of files you could download.
Later the world wide web began linking things together. Some of the bulletin boards migrated. Most files were still on ftp sites. You searched for them with Archie, Veronica, and Gopher. Nearly everybody used ftp in those days.
http://www.hartnell.cc.ca.us/faculty/jlagier/internet/gopher.htm
I remember being very excited when html web pages began appearing. Nando News was free and had a good news feed.
It wasn’t long and CNN’s web site launched.
Yeah man, I tell ya what, man. That dang ol’ Internet, man. You just go on there and point and click. Talk about W-W-dot-W-com. An’ lotsa nekkid chicks on there, man. Click. Click. Click. Click. Click. It’s real easy, man.
i remember the dial up access and the phone line sounds computers made while trying to get on line. The more noise your computer would make the worse the connection would be.
Watch War Games with Matthew Broderick.
You’ll see what it was like using an acoustic modem and dialing into bulletin boards. My first modem was 300 baud. I later upgraded to 1200.
Dot matrix printers are used in the movie.
The movie is a pretty good time capsule. Except for taking over a missile control system. That didn’t happen.
Bulletin boards weren’t really “the” internet, were they? That was just a bunch of people all connecting to one person’s personal computer, right?
At that time, the actual internet was mostly used by universities and government agencies, wasn’t it?
CompuServe was very popular.
The colleges and Universities were linked in a network. I don’t recall what it was called. Only faculty with research projects had access in the early days.
A lot of bulletin boards did migrate to the web. You could search for files and then login to the bulletin board or ftp site that hosted them.
I remember when Yahoo was most people’s home page. It was considered a web portal with links to everything.
Geocities offered free web site hosting. There were hundreds of web sites there.
Remember all the different search engines? There was what, Altavista, Webcrawler, Magellan, Yahoo, etc.
And who else used Netscape?
The really early Internet (1970s, 1980s) was mostly developed by researchers. Of course there were different networks and services like Minitel, Bitnet, Compuserve, private bulletin boards, Telex, all sorts of commercial networks, but the point is that connectivity and compatibility varied.
Maybe what you want to know is nothing technical, but rather the “user experience”? Note that your corner grocery store or the kid down the street was not necessarily online, for the same reason they did not own a mobile phone even though they could have – why would they? So the user base was (a bit) more exclusive and professional, perhaps? It was not 99% spam and scams and malware and foreign cybercriminals. Also remember the first web browsers and also the “Eternal September” were not until the early 1990s.
Autumn 1993: A young Happy was a freshman at the University of Michigan. I remember going to the computer lab and signing up for an email address with my buddy. We got to choose our usernames that would be our email/login for our entire college careers. I opted for a combo of my first and last names, my buddy opted for an abbreviated version of his favorite band (ledzep). For the first three months of the school year that year, my friends and I were mesmerized by this “email” thingamajigee. Mostly we just sent emails to each other insulting each others’ mothers. Regardless, it was so mind-blowing that we could communicate via computer, send each other messages without a phone.
My first experience with the Internet outside of school came in 1996, when the girl I was dating had AOL at home (her parents’ house), and getting online was such a big deal-- signing in and dialing up, complete with the loud screeches and honk-honks. If her mom or dad picked up the phone, we’d get kicked off. You also had to be aware of the amount of time you spent online as you were charged by the minute. Trying to look at a picture would take 3-10 minutes for it to show up. I remember one time she found some dirty pictures, and wanted to show me; I remember watching this picture appear on the screen one stupid line at a time over the course of, like, five minutes, and thinking “If you just took your shirt off, I could see tits so much quicker right now.”
In 1999, I took an English class that required us to write an essay on “Great Expectations,” except we had to coordinate what our topic would be with everyone else in the class because we would be “hyperlinking” to each others’ essays on the intranet (maybe it was the Internet, I don’t remember). This was my first experience with that sort of thing: being able to click on words on a page (“Pip” or “Magwitch” or “Estella”) and be directed to another page within that “web.” (I distinctly remember thinking “Hyperlinking? This is so weird. What’s the point?”)
Also, there was Napster, which was totally life-changing. Free access to every song you could imagine, and then some. Even access to remixes and mash-ups that you didn’t even know existed. I still have the digital copy of the first CD I downloaded and burned off of Napster-- 12 songs, mostly mash-ups and alternate takes of pop songs, including Eminem, Britney Spears, Wyclef Jean and Michael Jackson. I still remember the codes: red dot (bad file, don’t download), yellow dot (possibly bad), green dot (go ahead and download). And it would take upwards of 30 or 45 minutes to download a song if your connection was slow, maybe 5-10 minutes if it was good.
I don’t know if that’s what you meant by “early days of the Internet,” but those were the early days to me.
Well, for one thing there was no Google. The early search engines, which had weird names like Alta Vista and Magellan and Lycos, were so small and limited you could easily game the system so that your website came up early on the results under generic search terms. Every business owner wanted to come up in the top ten results, which is fine if you only have 2000 web sites but gets to be impossible after the first million, but was easier in Yahoo, which was a literal category list that you could edit and add to yourself (sort of like Wikipedia).
Every page was part of a Web Ring, had a hit counter, and rotating gifs. The blink and marquee tags were the bane of everyone’s lives, and Frames was an overused and poorly implemented design choice.
The browser wars were between Netscape and Internet Explorer, neither of which implemented CSS correctly, and even displayed colours differently.
There used to be unspoken rules of conduct, called netiquette, which applied to behaviour as well as web design, all of which is largely ignored these days, sadly.
And nobody really understood where it was heading. Most speculation of the web’s future was way off from what it has so far turned out to be.
(If you want to know what it looked like, though, the SDMB basically still looks the same as it always has since those early years - it really ought to spruce itself up a bit and join the 2010s)
Those were the days when spam email for porn sites still had very explicit images embedded and spam filters weren’t really that much of a thing.
There were also computer viruses that, if you left your computer on, would dial out on your modem to 900 numbers and foreign exchanges that would charge $5 a minute to your phone bill in the early hours of the morning.
Oh, I remember some really ugly, eye-burning sites. You rarely see a whole page of lime green text on a black background anymore. But the worst were the ones with background music, that the author felt you just had to hear so they coded the page to turn your computer’s volume up as high as possible.
There used to also be these other things called IRC (internet relay chat) and Usenet (a big open forum of several tens of thousands of topic sections), but those are pretty back-alley these days. I think I heard that AT&T blocks any access to Usenet these days.
[Hank Hill]Boomhauer, I told you for the last time. That thing is just toy. Get out here and drink some beer beside the road like a real man and cut your grass[/Hank Hill]
First of all, people are confusing the internet with the WWW. The latter is still only a small part of the former that has been around since the late 1960’s but with restricted access. I am not even that old so I can’t comment on the early internet itself.
I can tell you all about the early 1990’s on though. The web itself was both instantly fascinating and complete shit by today’s standards. There were no good search engines when I got a copy of Netscape 0.8 beta in 1994. You just had to find your way by jumping from link to link and hoping you guessed right.
They sold printed directories of websites in the college bookstore and it was only about as thick as a small town phone book. However, there was porn from the beginning. Some people claim that porn built the web and they aren’t wrong. That was the first web industry to turn a profit. However, we certainly aren’t talking about Pornhub type videos here. It was generally rather poor scans of single pages from old porn magazines and some tiny, short video clips. Colleges and universities, some early adopter businesses and a whole lot of random dweebs provided the rest.
Usenet isn’t the web but it was still very active at that time. It took knowledge and some esoteric tools to know how to use it but many people figured it out. It had everything from discussion groups like the cave man ancestor to this one to fetish porn and even applications but you couldn’t just download them with a click. You had to decode many part messages and then use tools to put them back together so that they would work. If you were missing even one then you were SOL.
I noticed the potential for the web just like I did for Bitcoin right away. I thought about buying up lots of desirable domain names in the very early stages but I didn’t because I was just a poor student at the time and didn’t want to lose any money :smack:
I would say that 1997 is when the web started to really take off. Major commercial sites started appearing even though they were very primitive compared to today. 1997 - 1999 were insane. I worked in tech at the time (and still do). It was annoying to post a resume with certain keywords in it. You could post almost any type of tech resume in the Boston area and the phone would start ringing literally within 5 minutes and would not stop for days. Very few of those companies exist today. Meanwhile, Amazon and Google were just getting ramped up. Amazon was a well-known company at the time even though it was just an online bookstore but Google wasn’t back then. It didn’t take hold until the very early 2000’s and now it is one of the biggest companies in the world.
Aren’t we still in the early days of the Internet?
No, it is finished. What you see now is all there ever will be. All of the good ideas are taken and spent.
No, they weren’t. The weirdest thing about the early age of networking was that there were so dang many completely independent networks out there, which might have communicated each other long enough to share email and maybe mailing list messages. I’ll give examples a bit lower down.
And some specific corporations. The first .com domain name was symbolics.com, where Symbolics was a corporation which made Lisp Machines, or very expensive high-end computers meant to be used for AI programming and other research work by people writing code in the Lisp programming language. Another early Internet company was BBN, or Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, which built the first routers (IMPs, or Interface Message Processors) and the first OS which implemented Arpanet servers, TENEX, for specially-modified PDP-10 mainframes built by yet another early Internet company, DEC, or the Digital Equipment Corporation.
That kind of stuff takes you back to the late 1960s and through to the early 1980s, during which time there were many other networks for a lot of other kinds of system, with different networks for different kinds of computer. For example BBSes were linked together by a few networks, one of them being Fidonet, which gave BBSers, who ran individual systems on home computers with modems going back to the later 1970s, the ability to share email and request files from distant systems and carry on discussions in fora much like the SDMB, which they called echoes. It was fundamentally an intermittent network, with systems periodically dialing each other in a phone-tree fashion (to reduce long-distance charges, which were murderous at the time), picking up new email and echo messages and leaving the email and messages they had, and things gradually propagated at telephone speed. This is called a store-and-forward network.
A system similar to Fidonet, which predated it by a few years, was UUCP, or Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol. It was another dial-up store-and-forward network, but with a smaller and less well-organized graph of which systems were usually connected to each other. The UUCP equivalent to echoes was Usenet, which survived long enough to be ported to the Internet and, indeed, survives to this very day.
The email addresses of Fidonet and UUCP reflected their respective connectivity styles: Fido addresses looked like 1:170/918, which means “Zone 1” (North America), “Network 170” (some local calling area), “Node 918” (a specific computer); that would be sent up the chain to the various “heads” or “coordinators” of the network, and then back down to the recipient.* UUCP addresses, on the other hand, spelled out which path the email should take, hop by hop, in what’s known as a bang path (because everyone knows the ! is pronounced ‘bang!’), which looks like this: foovax!backaix!hockeypux!kremvax!hunter which explicitly spells out that, from the system I’m on now, send this message to foovax, then to backaix (must be an IBM site…), then to hockeypux (Hewlett-Packard?), then to kremvax (Privyet!), and then put it in hunter’s mailbox on kremvax. People would notate these addresses with options, such as “{sunshine, mipsen, perdue}!utzoo!spencer”, which means that the machine utzoo can usually be reached from sunshine, mipsen, or perdue, and as for reaching those systems, it’s up to you. People drew ASCII-art maps of the UUCP network at various points in its history, and there was, in fact, a UUCP Mapping Project which lasted until mid-2000.
WIRED on the end of the UUCP Mapping Project, from 2000, when WIRED was relevant.
*(Yes, there was a big debate about whether people should create or propagate encrypted email, and a court case based on a shiny-new 1980s-era electronic privacy law regarding the privacy of email on BBSes. Thompson v Predaina, involving known kook Linda Thompson… and if you go searching for information about that case now, you see a ton of hand-wringing about it when it’s just beginning and then it drops off the map entirely. The case never went to court. Wasted some quality time with Google figuring that out.)
So the cheap systems had Fidonet, the middling-expensive computers running Unix had UUCP, the IBM mainframes had BITNET (or, Sir Not Appearing In This Post Because It’s Already A Fricken Essay), and the rarified few had Arpanet, which would evolve into the Internet given time and politics. Did they share email? Of course they did. How did they share email, given that they each had vastly different email addressing philosophies? This is software: They used bizarre hacks held together by configuration files and caffeinated sysadmins. This resulted in some hideous names.
“The Hideous Name” is the name of the paper Rob Pike and Peter Weinberger wrote in 1988 about how terrible some email address they were seeing around them were. The terrible part was how weird they had to get to jump networks: If you’re sending from a UUCP network, you need a bang path so UUCP software knows what to do, but if you then hop to Arpanet, you need an @ in there somewhere so Arpa’s email severs can handle it, and BITNET likes %, and at every step, there are people being clever with address translation software which attempts to automatically munge addresses so they’ll Just Work and the result was just bizarre. Like this:
research!ucbvax!@cmu-cs-pt.arpa:@CMU-ITC-LINUS:dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT
That’s UUCP (research!ucbvax) going to Arpanet (@cmu-cs-pt.arpa) going to the blistering bowels of insanity. It’s an example of what the Internet, as we have it today, brought us: Most people no longer have to know or care how many different little networks their data flows through to get from one end of the Internet to the other. Everything’s standardized around a single standard. The Internet ate the world.