Does anyone else remember fighting with that damned 640 KB limit? Even after I graduated from my VIC 20 and Commodore 64 to a 286 with an entire 4 Megabytes of memory the programs still had to reside in 640 KB of conventional memory. There were all kinds of tricks you had to pull with drivers and optimizers to work around the limit but what a pain in the ass it was.
Actually, I shouldn’t even say “pre-Web.” The World Wide Web was around, but graphical browsers didn’t hit the mainstream until 1994, IIRC. I do remember surfing the web (or at least connecting to a menu option called “world wide web”) via gopher back in those days, but it was a much different “web” than now.
As I said, I used Netscape Navigator on a regular basis. This was long after it was no longer in production and Netscape itself had virtually ceased to exist as anything other than a brand name owned by other corporations.
One day, features on Netscape Navigator stopped working. I tried it on a variety of separate websites and these features had stopped working on any of them. I tried reloading Navigator and that didn’t fix it. I downloaded a new copy of Navigator (it’s still floating around out there) and that didn’t fix it. So it wasn’t just that my software had become corrupted. Something had been changed.
I figured there were three possibilities. The first was that Navigator had been changed. But I don’t see how that would occur. It’s a defunct program from a defunct company. Nobody was issuing upgrades to Netscape Navigator.
The second possibility is that the websites changed their software and their new software no longer worked with Navigator. That’s believable if it had been one website. But this happened simultaneously on multiple websites. It’s ridiculous to think they all co-ordinated software changes like that.
The third possibility is that there was a change in my operating system, which is Microsoft Windows. Microsoft does make changes in Windows on a regular basis and it “upgrades” people’s existing operating systems. And it has a history of making changes that makes it difficult for non-Microsoft software to operate on a Windows system.
So I can’t say it’s a certainty that this problem originated with Microsoft. But I feel it’s a 99% likelihood.
Anonymity. Believe it or not, it was commonly thought that people couldn’t be tracked in their web dealings and that the internet would cause governments to lose track of their citizens as we inevitably turned to nefarious deeds. Really, we were wonderfully innocent in our understanding of the permanence and “trackability” of all this. Nowadays, the internet is a police state where the internet is the police. Get people mad at you, and your life can and will be seriously f*cked.
In the 1990s CNN would run feature and headline stories about new websites, which irritated the living hell out of me. Lou Dobbs would intone "Millions of people have dreaded shopping for caskets since time began. Now a new website offers you a chance to do this from the comfort of your own home… "
Jerry Garcia died on the same day as the Netscape IPO. No two historical events perfectly encapsulate the end of an age/dawn of a new age than those two, imho.
I had autoexec.bat and config.sys files for every game, as well as a batch file which would copy the correct files for when I would want to play a game. So, for example, Civilization 2 would have:
Config.Cv2
Autoexec.Cv2
Civ2copy.bat
I would type in Civ2copy, have the files updated, and reboot before I could play Civ2.
Used Memmaker like a pro… you had to, really.
I think my first exposure to the internet was GOPHER through a dial-up to my library. Good times.
And ubiquitous “Under Construction” GIFs. Because no website was ever really finished, and you didn’t want folks scrolling off the edge and breaking something. :dubious:
I remember when there was a scare that emails contained a computer virus, but all us experienced nerds guffawed and repeatedly pointed out that email was just text, and viruses could not be executed just by opening one. Just don’t open attachments that ended .scr or click links to unfamiliar websites.
And then MSOutlook came along and fucked that up royally, letting attachments execute just by opening the email.
When the Web first became widespread, in the mid 1990s, one of the watchouts for people was that it wasn’t safe to share your banking or credit card info online.
Once secure web transactions were available, one of the challenges was to convince users that things were secure. I remember a TV ad from the late '90s, in which a guy is buying something online, and using his credit card. His family all panic, and he reassures them: “No, really, it’s safe.”
Also: when I first got active on eBay, in the late 1990s, it was before Paypal, and I remember sending lots of postal money orders to pay for things that I’d won in auctions.
Usenet is a pure text service, no binaries allowed. So binary-to-text encoding was invented as a way to transmit binaries such as images, audio, video, and executables. The most common format was uuencoding. In addition, the size of a message was limited, so to transmit a full video, for example, you’d have to split the message into smaller chunks. So to get your pr0n, you’d have to download all the parts (hopefully the news server had all the parts), join them, then uudecode the joined file. This was an onerous multi-step process in the early days, but modern newsreaders have automated the whole thing.
Another big even from the early days: The Morris Worm from 1988.
An idiot wrote a worm that spread thru Unix-based computers on the Net.
I remember that everything was slowing down and slowing down and slowing down.
Then the IT staff came thru. They were shutting everything off. They spent all day and all night going to each machine, booting it up off the net, cleaning it and patching it.
Even non-Unix machines were affected since the whole network was unusable. A lot of people couldn’t get their research programs and such run that day.
Between extra work and lost time I figured it cost our school at least $40,000. Multiply that by all the places hit and it comes to a lot of money.
And Morris? No jail time! After all, his worm “caused no actual damage”.
Wait, what??? Losing money is not damage? How do you figure? This bozo belonged in jail with a life time ban from the Net. Instead he got a wrist slap.
Oh, and that “error” thing that made it so bad? Many people examining the code don’t think so.
That was it! Thanks.
Anonymity was the HUGE thing at that time. I was very active on sites like Diary Land and its clones, the belief being that nobody would ever know it was you IRL who was writing under a particular username. That factor alone is what, I think, propelled the popularity of message boards like this one right here 
On the flip side it also encouraged the advent of trolling BUT as long as everybody was anonymous, there were no long-lasting RL effects either way.
The other big thing I remember being amazed at was being able to communicate with all kinds of people. I remember being shocked at how many disabled and/or marginalized people I’d run into online. My now-husband told me that the internet was probably the greatest thing to have happened for them because it gave them a place to connect. I’d never thought about that before.
Dial-up modems were a PITA and downloading anything utterly depended on your modem’s speed. Our phone bill became much higher as a result. You could spend hours trying to get online without realizing it, never mind actually doing anything online.
One thing that I didn’t notice anyone else mentioning is duplexing. With some early programs, you could be either receiving or sending, but not both. When you had the ability to upload one thing while simultaneously sending another, it felt really high tech!
Also covered in the final chapters of the above-mentioned The Cuckoo’s Egg.
Even though I used QEMM, I spent many hours hand-tweaking configuration files to try to squeeze out a few more kilobytes from the base 640. Mattered even in Windows, since early versions were just fancy shells on top of DOS. Also used Stacker (and later DoubleSpace/DriveSpace) to squeeze more room out of my HDs.
I used Agent not only for Usenet but also for e-mail for probably close to 20 years. Still have tens of thousands of e-mails archived on it.
The program I used for encoding and decoding binaries for Usenet (up to and including full movies in early DVD rips) was called Wincode. Looks to still be available as abandonware, if anyone wants to play around with a bit of nostalgia.
Remember there was even a popular web site - Mirsky’s Wost of the Web that used to feature the most godawful designs. I am convinced some folks intentionally set out trying to create the most obnoxious designs for a shot at their own 15 minutes of notoriety.
Good Lord, that Space Jam site made my eyes hurt.
As late as the mid-1990s I had a nice online chat with one of the teenage hackers trying to break into my system and determined, as far as I could tell, that he was just having fun and not a paid member of a foreign criminal syndicate doing something malicious. When did that begin to change?
Not long after the whole thing started. As the primary sequence of events in The Cuckoo’s Egg tells, in the mid-1980s West German hackers were freelancing to the KGB, searching Internet-connected computers for DoD and US intelligence-related information.
Which is far beyond the bounds of a traditional ethical hack. As a point of comparison, some of their acquaintances in the Chaos Computer Club hacked the West German electronic payments system, and then gave the money back at a press conference. They gained cred within the hacking community (because reputation is the main currency of value there) and gave the government a chance to fix stuff. That wouldn’t work any more; it would be labeled “irresponsible notification”, because it gives other hackers a chance to get in before the victim can respond, but there were a lot fewer hackers on-line then.
Too late to edit, but the phrase I was looking for (bolded) was actually “full disclosure”, sometimes called “irresponsible disclosure” by contrast with “responsible disclosure”.
Before the internet we had BBSs which you had to call with a modem. They were almost always long distance calls which were expensive. Sprint had a service where you called a local number and it would then let you dial any number in the US (in specific major cities) for a flat rate. It worked at 1200bps. This would have been in 1986 or so.