I remember the dreading of September, with its hoards of sweaty palmed freshmen pouring into Usenet.
By my reckoning, today is September 7456, 1994.
Years ago I recall posting something here very similar to this. There was even an old joke about OJ Simpson’s site starting with “slash, slash, escape” or something.
Also now a lot of companies don’t even tell you their URL, they just say “Google us at Widgets Ottawa” or something.
On the flip side, I still hear radio ads that call the regular slash in a URL a “backslash.” (Even NPR does this from time to time.) It still annoys the ever-living-crap out of me.
The Kate Bush fan internet mailing list Love-Hounds was started on August 15, 1985. Here’s a compilation of some of the earliest posts. Some of those early email addresses were wild, using bang paths and percent signs. Examples:
walt.cc.utexas.edu!amadeus@cs.utexas.edu
IED0DXM%25OAC.UCLA.EDU@mitvma.mit.edu
We got on the net in 1989 but luckily had a normal email thanks to The World in Boston.
I had had two or three by then.
Like so many other things, it was done on a mainframe long before most people had seen a computer screen of any kind.
See IBM’s "Professional Office System (PROFS), released 1981.
IBM made a bizarre OS called VM. Very few shops had any use for it, but PROFS was available for only VM.
VM was installed with the only thing on it was PROFS. Everywhere.
This is when the demand for secretaries plummeted - now people could type their own memos , Believe it or not, this was an improvement in corporate security - no secretary to talk about what he/she had typed up, and no carbon paper requiring destruction.
And it eliminated the politically awkward problem of who got the 3rd or 4th carbon.
When AOL connected to the rest of the Internet, we called it “The September That Never Ended.”
I worked for a company that was still using PROFS until 1996 long after the rest of the world had moved to Exchange or some other PC based system. It was a joke by then but was an incredibly advanced system in its day. It had email, a spread sheet program and a word processing program. It eventually had email that could be used externally.
I like the part “if you can get on the web…”
When reading out the address, there sure was a lot of stroking going on.
I knew exactly which clip you were going to show.
It’s not even like it was impossible to shorten things then. I guess they just didn’t think such a thing was merited.
There’s no reason that URL couldn’t have been http://www.bbcnc.org.uk/cbbc or even, with a bit of ingenuity, http://cbbc.bbcnc.org.uk, and just redirected you to the full URL.
In 1995 or 96 I received for Christmas a large, 1,000+ page book, The Internet Yellow Pages, which was actually quite useful back then. 