I’ve heard it wasn’t open to the general public unless you were an academic or in the defense industry, however someone here in a past thread claimed they got home access from the University of North Carolina without being a student around 1990-91 just by giving them a copy of their ID.
Could a determined geek get true Internet access at home even earlier than 1990 by asking a college if they could dial in to their host? Or did they have to wait until Alternet and other for-profit ISPs came on the scene in the early '90s?
Also were Usenet and Fidonet open to hobbyists in the '80s or were they strictly for professors and researchers too?
I guess what I’m asking is did the ban on commercial use of the Net mean it was totally closed off to the general public, or did it simply mean people weren’t allowed to use it to make money?
I got interested in computers in the early 80s, when my boss at the time purchased a “mini” computer for our office. It was a “multi-user” system, meaning more than one person could be on it at once (though not in the same program!), had a 20MB hard disk drive, had to be backed up daily with 8" floppy disks and cost the company about $35,000. My job was to learn DOS, set up the inventory control program and learn how to use Word Star. I was enchanted.
I got my own first personal computer in 1986, a used Victor 8088 with a 20MB hard drive. I paid $600 for it and loved that old thing.
A good friend of mine was a librarian at Berkeley at the time. During a visit, she set up my computer to log onto the internet. So it was a “know somebody who knows somebody” kind of dealio. There were no GUIs, there were no www.whatevers. (Sorry for the non-link. The board’s software keeps inserting URL tags.) No one was paying attention to who was “logged on.” I ran that thing on dial-up with a 2400 baud modem and you had to know how to set the damn dip switches to make it work. I remember I was an early subscriber to Prodigy. That opened up the world of BBS. I exchanged recipes with New Yorkers while living in California and made my first online friends.
Not too many people had figured out how to use the internet to make money back then. It was pretty remedial, but still lots of fun. It wasn’t easy to access the internet, but it wasn’t that hard, either.
I was on the “internet” (they didn’t call it that back then) as an undergraduate engineering student in the late seventies. And I was on it even more in the eighties as an engineer working in the defense industry. I don’t recall any particular restrictions. It’s just that most people weren’t aware of it or interested in the benefits it afforded at the time.
I first got on the internet through q link … on a c64/128 … there wasn’t much to it it just a bunch of text …looked like something from mirc … odd thing tho if you did find a chat room you had to refresh it every 10 seconds …
Pretty much. There was also LISTSERV and USENET. Back in the '90’s, I used Gopher, and Archie, and Veronica and Jughead, and found documents of interest to people I knew, but even those didn’t exist in the '80’s.
There was this book, called “The Internet Yellow Pages.” It existed because, you never knew where to start to search for a topic you were interested in. When you found it, it was “http;//folcom.edu/Anresan/homerep/~laying_acoustic_tile/”. Seriously, a friend was laying tile, and said, “Can the internet help?” And I Archied for that document.
Yahoo came much later, and even then, it was practically guessing. I wanted to learn about HPLC buffers, at work, and it popped up … NSFW, buffer, urm … topics.
The main things you tended to see in the 80’s (in some cases only the late 80’s) were file access (FTP) remote login (telnet or rlogin) email (SMTP) network news (NNTP) and chat.
The sophistication of how you accessed and used things could vary greatly. I was lucky enough to have a Sun-2 workstation on my desk. That was pretty spiffy. But despite the GUI, mostly you just had windows with command lines within.
Rules for access to the internet varied greatly around the world. Here in Oz there were some very specific issues that the universities were forced to address during the early days of the uptake of interest in the Internet. However it is important to realise that dial in access was not something that was given out lightly. Anyone dialing in tied up a phone trunk line and a modem. Both were limited and costly things. There was no chance an enthusiastic geek would be able to convince us that they could dial in - we had a hard fought for modem pool and a surplus of our own academics and researchers that wanted to dial in. The question of tie lines was also crucial. Any large company would have a large PABX (or a distributed set of them) and there would only be a relatively small number of actual lines from the phone company into the PABX. Most phone calls were internal, and so you could run with a limited number of outbound lines. Someone dialling in during the day effectively wiped one entire line out. We got our modem pool allowed on condition it was never used in office hours. (And the bastards checked.) But at night it was a dog fight to get a connection. Sometimes you would have to wait until quite late before a modem freed up. Zero chance we were going to be giving away access to such a precious and limited resource.
CompuServe was my first taste of the internet in the 80’s. I had an account for a couple years.
Up at school the academic researchers had access to a network that linked various colleges together. It required special permission to access. It was primarily used to exchange research papers and data.
In 1990, Compuserve, etc., wasn’t the Internet. Not remotely. Nope. Nor was Usenet.
The first iteration of the Internet was the ARPANET. This connected a fairly small number of universities, research labs, and government (mainly military) sites.
Beginning in 1985, more sites were connected up via NSFNET, esp. more universities. Over the next 10 years, more stuff got interconnected with this. Including, controversially, some commercial email systems. In 1995, the full thing got opened up to all and the Internet became a thing. It was only at this point that services like AOL, Compuserve, etc. could actually join the Internet in full.
Usenet was a lot more than NNTP. For a long time most Usenet traffic was sent over dialup using UUCP and other protocols. In some countries for a long time, Usenet traffic continued to be be exchanged over dialup Fidonet connections.
There were a huge number of Usenet sites that weren’t on the Internet (and not using NNTP) well into the late 90s.
In short, in 1990, there was a decent number of places connected to the (future) Internet and since many of these places had a large number of staff and students, the total number of people with potential access was quite large. (But nowhere near as large as it would become.)
At first, most places just didn’t hand access to all staff and students (let alone to outsiders), but policies varied so it is possible that some outsider might have been allowed access for certain reasons, esp. as time went on.
Basically in the 80’s only universities and computer related businesses were on the internet.
The rest of the public did not know it existed! There was no money to be made, it was used for research and communication with other researchers.
EVERYONE on the internet was highly intelligent. My what a change I have seen since then!
And NO you could not call a University and get access to the internet. The dial-in modems were 300/1200 “baud” over noisy dial-up lines and the students/professors were lucky to get a good working connection. These connections were limited, sometimes not enough for the students/professors.
It was funded by DARPA or Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Note: Private (non-military related) companies were connected via “UNIX” computers using “UUCP”.
I got my first account in 1982. I was writing a book joint with someone in Cleveland. He was able to telnet (through commercial dialup companies–one of them was called Tymnet and they connected with Datapac in Canada) to my account on the university computer and thus we could exchange files. I telnetted from home through a 300 baud acoustic modem. Mail between Cleveland and Montreal took a minimum of two weeks. Even special delivery always took a week, so this made a big difference.
In late 1984, we finally got email. Princeton (where my son was a student) had before. Williams, where my daughter went got it only if late 1985 or early 1986. When my son started working at Microsoft in March 1989, they had an arrangement with U. Washington where they connected once every day, downloaded all the email coming in to them and uploaded all the outgoing email. Within a couple years, they had their own email server and direct address not through UW.
Francis Vaughan’s post above reminded me of something. By 1987, most university people had an email address. There was a meeting in England that summer and an Australian mathematician attending had the idea of collected everyone’s email address. Someone asked him to distribute it to all of us. The Aussie was shocked; didn’t we realize how much that would cost him? No, we didn’t since for nearly all of us, email was free. Not in Oz, it wasn’t. In fact, the Australian PTT charged them $1 a page for emails sent out of the country. I assume this was a matter of preventing email from taking over snail mail. Eventually, he sent the list to one person in the real world who distributed it to everyone. Eventually, of course, Australia joined the real world.
In 1984-5, I was a freshman in a dorm with a Commodore 64 and a 300 baud modem. My roommate had an Atari 800 with a 1200 baud modem. Even though we were in a dorm, we had to dial into the network. (BTW, 300 baud was slow enough that I could read faster than the screen could refresh. 1200 baud was screamingly fast by comparison.)
my first encounter with the internet was in 1984. Buddy of mine had a VIC20 a modem and a 5 1/2 inch floppy disk drive. Used to get video games for us (there were a group of us who had commodore 64 computers) from somebody in California. He also gave us all copies of a program that, if we had possessed modems, would allow us to direct dial each other’s computer from our computer. but since none of us had modems, I couldn’t tell you how that would have actually worked. It wasn’t long before dad brought home our first IBM clone and I discovered the joys of RPGs via the game Hack
All that to say, it didn’t seem difficult, you just had to know someone, and have the correct hardware of course
The question I have is when did it become useful to be on the Internet?
The internet was (and still is today) a great place to do research, but someone first had to upload information, facts and knowledge into the internet, so that others could do research.
When did the process of filling the internet with useful information begin?
If you didn’t have a modem, you weren’t on the internet. Even if you had a modem with a Vic 20, you still might be calling a local BBS which was not on the internet.
I didn’t say I was on the internet, I said it was my first encounter with it, sorry if that was misleading to you. My friend communicated via BBS but the files were not from the BBS, that required a different phone number to dial. Those are the parts that stand out in memory the most, because it was really cool to my teenaged self, to watch him use this really cool new thing, even though it took for-freaking-ever to get the files.
I was on the internet via my university from 1986-1990. You had email, usenet newsgroups, and FTP. It was dull, text only, Unix, command line stuff. Nothing sexy.
I sent and received less than 10 email messages in those years. I only emailed about Computer Science assignments with professors. You couldn’t email most people because hardly anyone was on there. And it was big production to dial up from my dorm room to the university computers. So even though a couple of my CompSci student friends had email, I would never dream of emailing them, “What are you doing tonight?” because they probably wouldn’t see the message for weeks.
The only thing I found immediately interesting were usenet newsgroups which were a precursor to forums like SDMB. There you could interact with people you didn’t know in real life about topics of interest. But I didn’t read them often because getting online was such a hassle.
In summary, although I found computers immediately fascinating the first time I used them in 1978-9, the internet was not initially very interesting. Without easy access, graphics, friendly UIs (web browsers), lots of people, lots of content, it was just an empty shell that didn’t do a whole lot.
FidoNet was invented by hobbyists, and has always been run by and for hobbyists. Anyone connecting to a FidoNet-capable BBS was welcome to use FidoNet at the sysop’s discretion. And anyone running their own BBS was welcome to have it join the FidoNet network, as long as they complied with the network specs (keeping the phone line open for intra-network communication for an hour every day, supporting certain message and file transfer protocols, etc.).
It wasn’t all that long ago. I have been on the web since Netscape 0.8a beta came out in 1994 thanks to a lab that I was working in. I thought it was amazing at the time (you could find at least one unique nude photo per hour if you tried really hard) but there weren’t any real search engines or much content for that matter. You just had to jump from one link to another and hope you found something resembling what you were looking for. The main “search engine” besides trial and error was a printed directory sold in many university bookstores and it wasn’t even very thick.
For example, my adviser in graduate school wanted an electronic picture of Ronald Reagan to use in a presentation. She knew I was better at finding things on the web than anyone else so she asked me to get her one. That sounds like the most trivial request in the world but it wasn’t in 1995. It took me over an hour to find a decent one and that was just through shear determination mixed in with some luck. There was no Altavista let alone Google. You couldn’t even pull up a photo of a President that had been out of office for less than 10 years without some effort.
I am still convinced that I was one of the first people to buy plane tickets on the internet as well. It was through a travel agency in Philadelphia. It was just some experimental service and they had no idea what to do with it. I eventually got my tickets (through the mail) but only after many phone calls and miscommunications. There was no Expedia or Travelocity in 1995 either.
The modern internet (the World Wide Web in particular) was born in the early 1990’s but it was still the domain of geeks and few elite people. I would mark 1997 as the year that the modern version of the World Wide Web truly began. It was still very primitive compared to today but the general ideas had already started to spawn and it was possible to do most of the things you can today in some rudimentary fashion if you were savvy enough.
That sounds surreal. It was 1987 that the Australian internet got its first permanent IP connection to the Internet proper. Before then it used a set of intermittent connections to allow exchange of email. Prior to a fulling functioning IP based network Australian academics used a set of different mechanisms to access international email. Most importantly there was ACSNet built by Bob Kummerfeld and Piers Dick Lauder. It provided email, news and file transfer from the early 80’s. I was sending and receiving international email on a regular and free basis in 1984. I have never heard of anything so strange as a $1 per page charge.
The cost of maintaining AARNet (The Australian Academic Research Network) was divided across all the participating universities, and each individual university would work out how to fund that. Some universities would on-charge individual departments for data, or hit them up for some part of the cost. Such charging became a mechanism for funding other internal network infrastructure in some universities. But AARNet only came into existence in the late 80’s.