It was a lot cheaper than CompuServe, or as we called it back in the day, “CompuSpend.” Their hourly rate went HIGHER the faster your baud rate was! :smack: Still, it’s SF&F forum was the place to meet some heavy hitters.
I feel ya. I specifically remember getting a hold of Win32s so I could run the better 32-bit versions of the web browsers. I actually think Internet Explorer was the one I liked the most, since it ran better.
I also remember when I could only connect to a Unix-based shell*. I could open Terminal in Windows, but it was only black and white, and only had Xmodem for downloading things. So I instead used Telix as my main way of connecting to the Internet.
Even when I finally got a SLIP (and later PPP) connection, I still would go back to the shell just because the Internet was so much faster. Not becasue it was text, though that helped. But because you only downloaded the text you could currently see. Telnet was 100x better, too.
At one point, I actually got a piece of software that let me browse the Internet over the shell. It would essentially type commands to open a webpage in Lynx and download it, and then type the URL for the images into Lynx to download them. This was actually the way I first got my “porn” (bikini clad ladies, but I didn’t know the difference back then).
*For the OP: a Unix shell is something like a DOS prompt (except it ran on Unix) that I could connect to over my modem, except it had various programs that worked online. There was FTP, Telnet (connect to any other computer directly), Gopher, Pine (email), Ychat (chat), and Lynx (Web). The connection was, like DOS prompt, entirely text-based. It also included Xmodem, Ymodem, and Zmodem, which let you download files that you had downloaded. Otherwise FTP would be useless. By the time I had my fastest modem, I could download a 1 MB file in about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, due to how my sofware worked, I couldn’t do anything else while I was waiting.
They added SLIP support at one point, meaning I could run a program and then use a TCP/IP program (Trumpet) to connect, allowing me to use Internet software on my own computer. Eventually they added PPP, which just worked automatically.
All of this was free from my school in 5th and 6th grade (1995-1997), given to the people in the TAG program (Talented and Gifted, a special class they would put some people into. I was one of the few who got in without being in the advanced classes). By 7th grade, anyone could get one, but they had to sign up for it themselves.
Not so much in DOS, since I could just run Memmaker, and loaded DOS into the “high memory area” it created. But fiddling with PIFs in Windows 3.1 to make sure programs had enough memory is something I remember a lot of.
The two things I remember when I finally got upgraded to Win 9x: not using Trumpet Winsock, and just having the Internet work automatically, and not having to futz with PIF files for my DOS games. More of them even worked in a window!
In those days computer hardware was advancing a lot faster than software. In the 1980s as the era of the 8bit microprocessor and these had limits on the amount of memory they could address: a princley 64k. You would be amazed by what you could do with that. People wrote sophisticated compilers in 8k, using assembler. Hard disk drives only came along in early 1980s for business use with 5Mb drives, which seemed like a bottomless pit of storage at the time. 16 bit processors became common by the mid 1980s and Microsoft MSDOS could access 640k of memory. When memory became cheaper, they started shipping with 2M and 4M and various techniques were used to get access to this memory through a little window beween the 640k limit and 1M. I spent a lot of time tweaking this using various programs like QEMM. The problem was the microprocessors were quite capable of making use of this memory, but they were forced into an emulation mode because the operating system was designed to run on older hardware. Desktop computing was rather having a big American car with a huge, powerful engine, tuned down the running at 55mph. Windows 3 had to be compatible with Windows 2. It got better with Windows 3.1 in 1992 and improved again in 1995 with Windows 95, by which time the Internet had arrived and Windows got a built in IP stack and the problem of accessing the higher memory went away.
There were no such constraints when running servers that could use operating systems that took full advantage of the faster 16 bit and 32bit processors and all the memory they could address. A server in 1990 still had just a few Mb of memory, and a few hundred MB of hard drive, but nonetheless it could provide file and printer sharing an office full of people. In offices were LANs and larger companies connected their sites with bridges and routers and WAN links. These networks and the email and file sharing and access to programs running on big computer systems through green screen displays was what computing was like in business in the 1980s and 1990s. The Internet was really a home grown phenomenon, it developed quite outside the world of big companies and organisations, who were pretty much stuck in the past, happy to have closed networks and all the important information stored on servers or on huge computer systems from the likes of IBM to handle all their accounting systems. Desktop computing in offices was all big spreadsheets, word processing and presentations. There were no websites, you source of information was email.
This was a good thing, because it allowed the Internet to grow organically as a public network, ISP connecting to ISP. Private companies, rarely connected their network to another company. They had email gateways, but connecting networks together was fraught with difficulty. Company networks were quite fragile systems and hugely complicated, they could easily go haywire. I had to fix them.
The Internet and IP, with some important modifications, could scale up and become a huge global network. This was and still is quite astonishing to the people who designed it. They never imagined it would be used in that way. By the late 1990s home computers were streaking ahead of office systems as the Internet fed users with huge media files that required graphic processors for gamers and video.
You could not buy a computer as a powerful as an iphone in the late 1980s. The pace of change in computing power has been remarkable and so has deluge of data and huge media files.
However, all this nostalgia for these feeble 8 bit processors and minimalist operating systems is not misplaced. We are surrounded by small computers these days - micro controllers are in every device with a switch and some lights. Our gadgets are getting smarter and starting to collect data and talk on the net. Skills acquired dealing with light weight computing devices are getting more important once again.
Right— what it all boils down to is, if your networks (even ARPANET) are not interconnected, then you don’t have an Internet. Once they are (and standard protocols help) and you do, all sorts of interesting things become possible.
Pretty much. But it requires one more thing: a dynamic that encourages sharing and connecting. Otherwise, why connect networks at all? Business and government networks had little reason at all to connect and lots of reasons not to: they wanted avoid network problems and the needed security, their data was precious. On the contrary, publicly funded universities had an obligation to share research data and also have their work reviewed by other academics - peer review. IP was a very unloved protocol, but it did have one redeeming feature: there was no claim on it for intellectual property rights since it was developed by publicly funded universities for networking computers. No licenses to pay to the likes of IBM, Dec or whoever. Their networking protocols were, in fact much better designed but affordable only to the big companies who bought large computer systems from them.
The people who ran BBS systems were often small companies with a Unix box running BBS software and bunch of modems for the dial-in customers. The bigger concerns like AOL, Prodigy, MSN, Compuserve really thought that the BBS business was the way to go and they could dominate the market. However, that dynamic of using Open source software and connecting one network to another they way they had done linking BBS systems meant the Internet grew organically: the more the ISP networks were connected to each other, the more it was valued by subscribers who could see more and more servers. Berners-Lee and his HTTP server and HTML Browser came along at just the right time to make the whole thing usable for non-geeky customers. The graphical element was appreciated by media marketing people. In the UK the first Internet cafe in the UK was Cyberia in central London and it was started after an Internet art event. The Internet cafe concept spread very quickly around the world around 1994. Besides selling coffee, cakes and access to Internet connected computers, they also became like a franchise. Buy a router and a link to the Internet, then make money out of renting time on the computers. Quite a low barrier to entry into a business. Cyberia had graphic designers and web a website design business in the basement. Pretty soon the big telcos started selling ISP access services that allowed ISPs to scale without being bricked in by squawking modems, cables and servers and the router and switch manfacturers started making lower cost devices for this growing market. Some of the small cafes and ISPs grew into substantial businesses.
This new business model was very important, it encouraged companies to work together to develop modifications to IP to make it scale up. From a technical point of view it was pretty impressive how problems were dealt with co-operatively so everyone agreed on the best way to improve the standard. There were a lot of problems to solve: limited addresses, routing the wasted big blocks of addresses, no sharing of addresses when websites shared a sever, no security at all, no way standard for prioritising traffic consistently. All pretty major design flaws that got fixed one by one in the mid 90’s as it grew and grew. Pretty soon the big corporates started running servers on their internal networks and I spent a lot of time fixing their network problems.
I don’t think many people really understood what was happening with the Internet as it began to take off in the early 90’s. It was the birth of a new ‘public’ network based on data packets to connect computers. Telegraph lines, telex machines, telephone lines were all circuit based, you had to be at the end of a line, one to one. The Internet, once you were connected, is any-to-any on a global scale. Though the technology was available if you were a big company it wasn’t until the cost of the equipment came down and free software became capable enough that the barriers to small businesses entering the market were lowered and the ISP bandwagon got rolling. It achieved a ‘critical mass’. Those marketing media folk actually played an important part in making it seem desirable and credible, otherwise, it would have been the preserve of the ‘beards and sandals’ and I daresay we would not have the wonderful choice of amusing cat videos we enjoy today. 
The Cuckoo’s Egg is a great book. Its ancient history now, but its sort of a facinating look into early hacking, computer security and computer forensics.
I worked with the IT Security guy - there was only one - at a big company back then, phone hacking was a thing and you’d subscribe to the phone hackers newsletter…on paper.
Chatrooms and Conversations!
As someone who has recently struggled with loneliness, this is the number one nostalgic thing I miss about the early days of the internet. I could log into a chatroom talking about TV, I could say “Hey are there any Dragon Ball Z fans in here?” and I could get a bunch of “Yeah I am!” and I could IM this random person who I’ve never met and talk about DBZ for as long as I wanted.
I met people from coast-to-coast and all around the world through these chatrooms. We talked TV and music and writing and it was awesome. You can’t find that anywhere anymore that isn’t automatically creepy and full of kids wanting to get you naked (if you’re a female natch).
I miss being able to randomly converse with a stranger about something we both liked without the stigma of what it means to do so nowadays.
Looking back on it, cybersex was hilarious. Without the capabilities to take and send instant pictures like we do now, you had to really get creative with your scenarios. I would love to have some kind of magic, all-knowing device and ask it “In all the years I cybered online, were any of them legit females?” That big 0 would make me laugh so hard.
freenode.org lists 89000 users this instant, Undernet.org says there are over 17000 users online, efnet.org reports nearly 20000, IRCnet has 27000, etc. Wikipedia claims the number of IRC users is 60% down from 1000000 users in 2003, but that still leaves 400000 users to converse with, so I doubt there is a shortage of chatrooms all of a sudden. Here you go: IRC Chat Rooms - Search
In those text-only early days of the Internet, you really did need a lot of imagination and it could also go very wrong:
http://www.loonies.org.uk/1996.07/0096.html
It’s all been downhill since Zombo.com.
ETA: Just the other day I was just thinking about some of the more infamous USENET loons from the olden days: Ludwig Plutonium (or whatever his name was that day), Alexander Abian, Serdar Argic… such larks.
Archimedes Plutonium. He had his name legally changed after the photon containing the personality of Archimedes struck his brain, making him the reincarnation of Archimedes. Others of note include Ed Conrad and Nancy Lieder.
And it looks like old Archy is still around.
What, no love for Kibo? Kibo was frickin’ ubiquitous! You could summon Kibo by mentioning his name three times! He had his own religion! He had his own newsgroup!
(I guess it’s debatable if Kibo was a loon, however.)
Actually just once was enough. An early example of a script for searching and posting based on a keyword.
Once someone sent him a bag full of coconuts. He was puzzled and asked about it online. The answer was obvious:
“It’s a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brasi sleeps with the coconuts.”
** crickets **
And as happy as we were with that, we were ecstatic when we got up to 2400. Geez, that was lightning fast!!!
Hacking before the Internet was often a case of hunting calling telephone numbers to find those with modems attached and connected to unattended computers. Listen for the squark of a modem, then try different setting until you get a prompt from a computer and then explore. There were actually quite a lot of these around for remote access by staff and engineers. Some, indeed, were private phone switches (PBX) and cracking one of those could easily be the gateway to worldwide free calls. Phone calls were very expensive.
Here is an example of true pre-Internet hacking. IBM 360s came with a bunch of macros - snippets of assembly language code which did things for you. The OS had a normal mode and a protected supervisor mode which allowed you to do things illegal in normal mode - kind of like root on UNIX systems. Some of the macros were buggy and left the machine in supervisor mode upon exit.
A friend of mine in college whose father owned a 360 submitted jobs that tested this and printed information showing he could get into supervisor mode. He never did any damage.
This was about 1970 - when hacking was a generic term, including both computer stuff and stuff like putting a cardboard police car on top of one of the MIT domes.