Early days of the internet.

In My Humble Opinion
81

You kids today with your fancy-pants web browsers … yeah, Netscape was pretty cool when it hit the internet …

hahaha …

No, I never used Mosaic as my main browser, but I had to keep a copy on-hand to check that my web pages rendered properly in it … sometimes what looked good in Netscape turned out like shit in Mosaic, and enough of my clients still used Mosaic that I had to make sure …

I think the biggest difference for me is that way way way back in the 20th Century, we had to have a separate application for each internet protocol … a browser for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP aka the web), I used Eudora for my Post Office Protocol (POP aka e-mail) and Fetch for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) … today we can access all these with our browsers …

Netscape the company died … but AFAIK the software continues today in Firefox … and this software goes back to the beginning of the web … Al Gore didn’t invest the internet, he spearheaded the effort to get Federal tax dollars used to develop a brand new, user friendly protocol on the internet … this money was used to create the servers and clients we use on the world wide web, thus Mosaic is generally considered the first browser … once this was done, and Federal dollars dried up, a group of folks from Carnegie Mellon University broke away and form the Netscape company and produced an improved (and copyright protected) browser … and everything was beautiful …

Then Microsoft introduced IE … what a clusterfuck that was …

82

I first started out with BBSs; you’d dial them up. Many were a single phone number; it was cheap to get a phone line that only answered calls, so you could set up the software and publicize the number (usually on other BBSs). They were much like the Straight Dope. In addition, there were networks of these (e.g., FIDOnet), where the posts were shared with other BBSs, so you could have a debate with anyone.

Back in 1989, I joined GEnie. They had a special deal with their Science Fiction Round Table (essentially a BBS): published authors got free memberships. The SFRT was the place to be if you were into SF. One highlight was J. Michael Straczynski talking about his Babylon 5 project, and George R. R. Martin about his TV projects (Before he wrote the Game of Thrones books). Wil Wheaton was on, too, admitting that he knew that ST:TNG was terrible.

There really wasn’t an Internet. GEnie offered access in the end, but few people used it. There were also other services like Compuserve, the Well, Prodigy, AOL, and a few others.

These were all on modems. Speed was ridiculously slow; you could download text files reasonably, but graphics and programs took ages.

I got onto the Internet when GEnie self-destructed. I used Netscape at first, then eventually MSIE. You had Yahoo for searching – it was indexed and curated and not all websites were included. Alta Vista was my main search engine until Google came along, but there were many others.

83

… but don’t have to.

I still use dedicated software for POP mail and for FTP.

84

CompuServe forums get wiped out on December 15. I wonder if anyone has managed to salvage the archives, which would go back to the 1980s and were not accessible to Internet scrapers. Same question for GEnie and the interesting forums you mention.

85

I also paid and used the full version of Agent for Usenet (vs. Free Agent) for many many years (decades?). I only stopped browsing Usenet last year when I switched from my Earthlink DSL to full broadband from Comcast. As far as I know Comcast doesn’t provide Usenet access.

86

Things were never really the same after Eternal September.

87

As far as I know, none of the biggest ISPs provide their own Usenet servers. I think you’re stuck subscribing to an external Usenet host service, and as much as I enjoyed and learned from Usenet in my larval years, I don’t need it nearly as much (google + WWW + web message boards is a 100% superior replacement) and I’m certainly not paying for it out of nostalgia.

88

Morris was hardly an idiot, and he was not malicious. It was an experiment which got away from him. I didn’t suffer from it, since I was working at Bell Labs at the time and Morris matched the sendmail bug on the Bell Labs UNIX system which allowed the worm to propagate.

89

A couple of people have mentioned the Eternal September, but didn’t explain it. It used to be, the only people with access to the Internet were at universities. Every September, then, you’d get a new crop of freshmen coming on to the Internet for the first time, and who had no real clue how all of this worked, or what good manners called for. Over the course of the year, they’d learn how to get by and get along, until the next September, when the next crop of clueless noobs showed up.

And then AOL started offering Internet access. Suddenly, the Internet wasn’t just universities; it was everyone, and new users were coming in all the time. Instead of just having to suffer noobs for one month a year, now you had to put up with them constantly. What used to just be September was now eternal.

90

I still have a copy of Netscape 1.0 on a floppy somewhere downstairs (Try encapsulating a modern browser in that amount of space…). I often wondered if it would actually even work today. I joined later in the game in the early 90s; everything took time to download, especially “pictures”. I was in my 20s, what did you expect? I spent a lot of time on ICQ chatting and doing research for my university correspondence courses which was a Godsend compared to doing it all by analog and ordering from the library, waiting for the book and sending it back.

91

My memories of early Internet (not BBSes) around 1994 are centered around Windows 3.1 and Winsock. Windows 3.1 didn’t support the TCP/IP protocol that the Internet used, so you had to install Winsock (Windows Sockets) to let Windows get on the Internet. IIRC that install included editing the autoexec.bat and other files. These instructions are still on the Internet at hawaii.edu: http://www.hawaii.edu/its/micro/pc/win31/win31nic.html

Back then I used NCSA Mosaic and later Netscape as a browser. It did the basics of displaying web pages with hyperlinks, images, different text sizes, bold text, italic text, annoying blinking text, and supported bookmarks. There were small images but images weren’t very common or big because many people were on 9600, 28.8, or 56k modems and images would take quite a while to download.

Speaking of modems, you had to dial into a provider that would give you Internet access. IIRC most people paid between $10 and $20 a month for dial-up Internet. And of course it tied up a phone line in your house while your modem was connected.

Windows 95 was a big deal because it came with TCP/IP and you didn’t have to mess with installing Winsock any more.

It was hard to get people to websites because there were no search engines as we know them today, and if you were typing an address you had to type the entire thing including the http:// And of course people confused forward slash and backslash.

There wasn’t a ton of stuff on the early Internet, mostly educational and hobby stuff. No video and very little audio, both due to bandwidth restrictions. It was only once Macromedia Flash started becoming popular around 2000 that simple animations were possible because they were vector data and sent instructions to render a (usually cartoon-like) scene on the viewer’s browser rather than having to send every pixel in a compressed format like modern video does. Ren & Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi was one of the early Flash animators on the Internet.

Companies gradually adopted the Internet but it was a lot of 1 to 10 page sites just to stake their claim, with “Under Construction” messages at the bottom. Online shopping didn’t get big until later in the 2000’s with Amazon especially.

By the way, you can go to archive.org and see what various web sites looked like when computers and Internet were much slower. Check out Amazon.com for example.

92

Can we have a moment of silence for GeoCities?

93

No because there is no way to stop the MIDI Background music from playing. :slight_smile:

94

In many cases, it not only tied up a phone line – it tied up the phone line, as many people only had one line to their houses. Which was likely another reason why most people didn’t spend the entire evening online.

That also reminds me – IStR that, if you had Call Waiting on you home line, you would want to put into your dialup script the command to disable Call Waiting, because, if someone called your number while you were online, the incoming Call Waiting signal would disrupt your internet connection.

I got a second phone line for the house, specifically for the Internet, in '97 – after AOL went to a flat rate plan, and once I discovered a group that was playing Strat-o-Matic Football online (using an AOL chat room) – those games took 2 hours or longer, and that was just too long to be occupying our only phone line.

95

The DOS prompt was really scary! We kept having to call my co-worker over because he was the only one of us who could actually get online and talk to people. Eventually we all gave up except him and he now works for tech services. Today is better. Believe me.

96

Yep all those DOS command, editing the autoexec.bat, config.sys and Win.ini files, drivers, IRQs, DMAs, jumpers. Just getting a modem or network card installed was far more difficult than today’s plug-and-play world.

97

I remember "Cool site of the day, " which still exists. Imagine someone attempting to find the coolest new site each day now. There’s till some interesting links from 1994.

98

I downloaded and installed the last version of Netscape Navigator 9.something.

It runs on basic stuff. The main problem is that it is far from up do date on TSL/SSL stuff. So tons of warnings connecting to stuff.

Very retro look. Comes prebuilt with AOL/Yahoo! defaults. Ugh.

99

I remember aol and webcrawler… at the fair in a tech of the future display … I first used aol 1.5 when I was 17 in 1990… I used ot have aol bills of a grand or more because of neverwinter nights

100

missed the timer :

people owed aol thousands of dollars because they didn’t flat out pay them or “johnny teenager” didn’t know he was chating for 3.95 an hour and them walked them back " /but aol didn’t have a collections dept back then so you could run up a bill bail and rejoin 2 days later

also I remember when you could go I’m to cs/aol and have a conversation in a random chat room … after unlimited all that died really …

Anyone remember the isp rebate fiasco ? how this worked was you went to a retailer signed up to an isp for a year and they gave you a 1-300 dollar gift card there were 5 or 6 that did this … by signing up to for that in several locations people were building/upgrading whole pcs out of gift cards (I had 4 which I paid for and almost had paid off until I had check problems)

But the trick was set up a checking account go to every store you could get rebates and then close the account before the due date… the isps lost millions and some even went under …