Pre-WWWeb Internet questions

Factual Questions
1

I’ve searched our SDMB to no avail (although I’ll admit I’m not sure I used the best parameters). So, what was the Internet like before the WorldWideWeb?

Were there http sites? Were there sites? I guess there were some kind of ftp sites. Is that right?

Now we’ve all got browsers, and we surf from within such. Prior to browsers, how did one navigate? Were there search engines before the Web?

I have the impression that the Web married html and its included graphics capabilities to the concept of websites. But it was built upon the existing Internet. When’d the Web start (~1992)?

Were there graphics capabilities beyond emoticons and ASCII art before the Web?

Just stabbing at it, I’d suppose email was an early arrival. Was it then of the form soandso@this.com?

Were there maillists? Did chat exist pre-Web? How far back does Usenet go?

And how do BBSs figure in the picture?

What was it like?

And, supposing that I’ve asked enough real questions that have definitive answers to qualify this query for manny’s domain, let me ask the pre-Web vets a question that is sure to generate responses flavored by opinion: How do any of y’all who date back to pre-Web 'net life and/or BBS life feel about the blossoming of the WWW? Some, I gather, resent the ease of access this development has granted to the unwashed masses; others seem to embrace this enhancement of communication.

2

A few of your questions are answered here:
What is the oldest website on the Internet?

There were no http sites before the web (those are the web, in a sense). Before web browsers and the http protocal, there was gopher, which was essentially a text-only, stripped down type of web browsing. I don’t recall running into any commerical gopher sites; it was mainly academic/research info. Before (and during) the gopher period were a multitude of ftp sites (anybody remember the wustl FTP archive? I haven’t been there since they’ve got a web page (at least 7 years ago). You basically kept a list of good ftp sites that archived various types of software, etc. At some point (1995??) Archie came out - this was an ftp-site search engine, which archived all the files at an ftp site. You could do an archie search to find software and data- a big breakthrough. AFAIK, this was the first “search engine” for data files.

Usenet news was a big part of internet life, and is still out there. Usenet goes back to almost the very beginnings of the internet, along with email. Mailing lists go back to the very beginning, also.

Before the user@hostname mail format, you had the bang character - site!computer!name - where I believe the email route had to be specified to an extent. The details are a little hazy, I ony had to deal with this format once or twice around 1988/1989.

AFAIK, there was no graphics on the internet comparable to web browsing. Images were (and still are) traded on usenet via uuencoding.

Chat-type programs have been around a while, starting with talk, a user-to-user chat (which IMHO is much better than instant messaging, since you could see each character as the other person typed- this makes it like a conversation).

BBSs didn’t really figure into the internet, at least not for me. Each BBS contained it’s own little world of file archives, chats, discussion boards, etc., without a connection to the internet (except possibly through email).

As far as user experience goes, the internet today, with web browsing, is far better than it used to be. It was just as easy to kill time and be entertained - with MUDs, Usenet news, email, talk, etc., but much harder to find useful information.

Arjuna34

3

In the beginning, there was Telnet. And the Users connected to other computers using Text Input. And it was good.

Lo, and one of the Users saw a file He wanted. And the Users said, “Let there be FTP.” And the Users created FTP to move files from one computer to another. And it was good.

But, alas, a darkness came over the land. “How can we find the files we need?” the Users cried. So the Minnesota Users created Gopher. Gopher found the files and showed the Users where to FTP. And it was good.

And Gopher begat Archie, and Archie begat Veronica, and Veronica begat Jughead, who searched the FTP sites with greater and great wisdom.

And then Satan created e-mail . . .

4

An interesting article on the invention of the @ for email, and also, a cheap plug for my school:

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/NewsComm/Magazine/Sep00/Pioneers.html

5

I came to the Net about 1988/1989 timeframe. All we really had was FTP, Telnet, e-mail, and USENET. And let me tell you - the USENET of old was something special. Before it was flooded by the “Make Money Fast!” and “Hot Asian Sluts in your Inbox!” posts. Yes, those were two of the most common titles.

Art was limted to ASCII, and people would spend days making incredible ASCII art.

The population of the net was about 1-2 standard deviations higher average intelligence, and it was overwhelmingly composed of researchers, scientists, computer techs, and college students. It was…nice. Small, but deep.

I would never want to go back…but there were some pretty good times. I remember the first time I FTP’d a file - from India. And I said “Holy crap! I just downloaded this Bo Derek picture all the way from India - and it didn’t cost me anything!”

I remember first posting in USENET, and the joy at getting my first answer back. And my first e-mail too. Good times.

6

@ was actually the first symbol used to indicate machine name for email. The first email system was on the very-early ARPAnet. Each machine on the ARPAnet had a “mail” program where users could leave messages for other users on the same machine. Each machine also had a program for transferring files between machines. Some guy (forget his name) said, “Hey. Here’s a neat idea. Let’s combine the mail program with the file transfer program.”

In an interview, he said he never thought it was a particularly important invention, just a neat hack.

Fast forward a bit and you have the public Internet. The most common things were Usenet distributed newsgroups (Usenet is still in full operation of course) and using telnet to login to remote machines on which you had an account. Some public databases and MUDs also worked through telnet.

FTP sites were the primary way to get files. Some people programmed the first robots like Archie, which indexed a bunch of FTP sites it had in its database. This was the only way to search for stuff you could get with FTP. Like all web search engines, it only searched the indexes of sites it knew about.

Gopher was the real pre-cursor to the http://www. It was a simple protocol for retrieving text-only documents, which were indexed by other search engines.

Then Tim Berners-Lee at CERN decided to add hyperlinks to Gopher, so documents could reference one another directly. Then he made HTML1, which had no images or tables. HTML evolved and the HTTP protocol was formalized.

Then some people got a truly fantastic idea. They said, “Hey, these neato web browsers don’t care where the HTML comes from, they just display it. Let’s write programs that generate HTML on-the-fly instead of just serving static files.”

E-commerce was born. Billions of dollars were thrown out the window. Et cetera.

7

One important point that no one’s mentioned yet is that there was a time when PPP (and SLIP) had not yet gotten popular – or even gotten invented. So even though you could dial into your ISP with your 2400 baud modem, all you could do was open a terminal session. No fancy windows e-mail program, no web browsers, none of those other cute utilities. Heck, Windows barely even supported networking until Windows for Workgroups. And then it was an add-on driver to get TCP/IP. Primitive days indeed.

Now gopher was evil. On the systems I used, there was no concept like the “address bar”. All you could do was go from link to link. If you wanted to go someplace in particular, you had to wander aimlessly until you find a gopher site that had a really large directory of links, like a search engine, and then go out from there. PITA.

Also, finding files was hellish. Archie always seemed to be more of a theoretical exercise than a practical resource. If you didn’t know the exact name of the file you were looking for it was useless, and the sites that did have the files tended to not actually exist when you went what you wanted. Search engines really were a lifesaver.

8

I got my first Internet e-mail address in the fall of 1991, as a freshman in college. It was a BITNET (Because It’s Time Network) address: mweintr@auvm.american.edu. At first, our computers at American (IBM 3270 terminals, vintage 1973, just like I am) weren’t even on the “Internet,” we connected via BITNET. It wasn’t until '93 or so that my address was shortened to mweintr@american.edu.

The first applications I used were e-mail and IRC. Usenet came soon after, but most of what I got from usenet was better served in e-mail lists (Cecil bless listserv). I first “saw” the WWW in the spring of 1994, on a friend’s computer while in Pittsburgh at CMU. I thought it was very very cool.

FTP was around from the beginning, but I never really used it, too, simply because it wasn’t easy to get files from the FTP server to a floppy disc I could use on my laptop PC in the dorm room. (I eschewed dialing-in to the server for sitting in the computer lab because I was a night owl, and my roommate hated me typing on the keyboard at all hours.)

Ahh, the good ol’ days. AU replaced the 3270s during my senior year for some new and blazin’ fast Pentium systems…

9

Re: ASCII art, there are examples of typewriter art going as far back as 1898, so making pictures out of letters, numbers and punctuation marks is nothing new. I remember downloading a lot of ASCII art on my Commodore 64 off of BBS’s back in the day – mainly crudely drawn naked women :smiley: Also, the C=64 had a bunch of extra “art” characters accessable through the Control and C= keys that were used to draw pictures and even create movies (I made a few myself; it was a script where you drew what you wanted, erased things, re-drew…etc and the computer remembered all your keystrokes and would replay them). Back in my early days on the bona fide internet, I spent a lot of time in alt.ascii.art and think some of my work is still floating around on the net in various archives.

10

Actually, Usenet only goes back to about 1980 or so. The ARPANet started in 1969, I understand.

But the person to really ask about Usenet is Henry Spencer. I believe he wrote some of the early Usenet software. Or rather rewrote it, after the first version proved inadequate. I know he has an account at the SDMB, but am not sure if he’s still reading it.

11

xtrek! xtrek xtrek xtrek. I blew many weeks of time getting my ass kicked at xtrek in '89-'92.

The Internet was really just a way for computers to talk to each other, and other protocols built on top of that. If you could telnet, you could enter a real-time connection with a remote machine - upon this foundation many things were built. There was ‘talk’, which was very much like AIM, MUD’s/MOO’s (don’t ask me what they stand for) which are like text-based EverQuest environments. And for the discriminating palate, xtrek - sort of a cross between a MUD and a really sophisticated version of COMBAT from the Atari 2600 - but I’m stretching the metaphor pretty thin.

xtrek was built on the X windowing system, a windowing environment like MS Windows was, a layer on top of a text-based OS. You would connect to a server and join a community of people in a graphical Star Trek universe and kill one another. For a brief overview and some screenshots of xtrek action, go to Netrek - Planetary War in Cyberspace

I think the fact that I call it xtrek instead of netrek marks me as a twink, but I’m not sure. I’m positive not being sure marks me as a twink.

Oh, and we had a sound effect for getting killed in the computer lab - DOOSH! Of course, someone renamed tcsh ‘doosh’ in honor of this sound, backronymed to “Dynix Object Oriented SHell”. In fact, look what I found:

I believe tom was in fact the originator of ‘doosh’. If not, it was ERic.

Perhaps emarkp will be along shortly to help me out.

12

Honestly. My students thought I was going potty when I began to reminisce about entering Paradise through the Niss gateway.

Yeah I was all a bit like shouting out into the dark, but it was exiting. Oh telnet! I’m getting all nostalgic.

Aye, well in the olden days it was telnet, email, ftp and gopher, with Archie, if we were lucky. And there was none of this GUI and windows nonsense.

And try telling the young people of today that and they won’t believe you …

13

I wondered if that was THAT Henry Spencer, and had decided not. Do you know for sure, or did you just note the name? That Henry Spencer was at U of Toronto the last I knew. The person using that handle on these boards has a hotmail address, seems to get involved in a lot of rock music discussions, and asked an elementary question about Lotus 1-2-3. It doesn’t sound like the same guy:

Oh, Henry …

For the record, I was on USENET before the great renaming. I remember net.suicide, and when there were at least four (widely distributed) Grateful Dead newsgroups because some early versions just created new newsgroups when somebody posted to a new newsgroup name, including spelling errors - it didn’t require a control post to create a group.

LOTS and LOTS of people wrote various versions of the USENET software, BTW.

14

In fact, in one of those posts, our Henry Spencer says “I’m now 25”. The redoubtable Henry Spencer of utzoo is in his late forties, or just past 50:

http://www.lysator.liu.se/c/henry/

BTW, when I searched for him, I found a “Henry Spencer Company” in Potomac Falls, VA, doing windows software. It turns out to have been concocted from the last names of the two founders. I don’t know whether they were ignorant or nervy.

15

Just to note a couple more things:

In the Old Days[sup]TM[/sup] it wasn’t uncommon for an email or Usenet message to take a week or so to get from its source to some destinations. That’s because, at the time, the “Net” wasn’t all TCP/IP; there was UUCP (Unix to Unix Copy Protocol), DECNET, whatever protocol IBM mainframes run (no, not SNA; RSCS, maybe?) that I can’t think of at the moment, plus other stuff. UUCP is a non-interactive forwarding protocol, which meant that if you were using it, you’d dial up your provider every so often (say once a day, or once every 12 hours) to retrieve messages meant for you and to send messages that you originated. One reason for requiring bang paths was that UUCP routing wasn’t very sophisticated. True TCP/IP access was very expensive back then, so if you were trying to get connected at home without a terminal session, chances are you’d be running UUCP (probably on SCO Unix or an old Sun workstation, since Linux wasn’t out yet). Many places gave free UUCP connections. UUCP came out for the PC in around 1990 or so (it was called UUPC).

Also, before we had IRC, there was Relay, which ran on BITNET using the aforementioned IBM protocol.

16

Bang paths - yeah, I remember when pathalias databases started coming into common use. There used to be (probably still is) a newsgroup for distribution of UUCP map files for use by pathalias. There was a bunch of other junk in those files that was essentially commentary to the pathalias program, such as latitude / logitude info and so on. I once wrote an extractor to maintain a database of all that stuff, complete with bounding rectangles for countries so it could error check the position info.

Since there were several email systems in use, if you really wanted to see something obnoxious, you tried to do something like mail to somebody within the VMS world from UNIX. You had to use bang path routing to get the message to a VMS gateway server (decwrl was a well known one), and escape a whole huge other piece of different routing syntax to be used within the VMS network. It actually worked. If you were lucky.

Propogation times were slow enough for USENET that there had to be special circularity detecting provisions to prevent messages propogating multiple times by reaching a site that had already expired the article, and would otherwise see the article as “new” again. That happened in early versions.

(For those of you unfamiliar with it, USENET is a “store and forward” system where each server stores articles locally, and forwards them on to other sites, so when a user connects, they read the copy off their server.)

And the plural of VAX is “vaxen”.

17

By the time I got an e-mail account at university (fall 1993), lots of the crazy stuff mentioned above had been made simpler. I still had to log-in to my e-mail account through a kind of Telnet system (I guess). But it was part of the full Internet, thankfully.

I was taking a “computing” class at the time to raise my GPA and this lousy TA took us to see the computer science dept computers. They had this color monitors with pictures of the current Space Shuttle mission!

Holy jeeze, I thought. How come I don’t have that? How did they get these pictures on the screen? All I have is a black screen with text! What the heck is that anyway.

Anyway, the TA did a crap job of explaining the Web and giving us any context. When they finally did let us play with the Web in one of the labs, I decided to go to the Northwestern website and see if I could find my friend - who was at school there. Porn sites hadn’t been invented yet…

18

Remember, too, that there were three different systems and ways of connecting.

In the old days, the Internet was primarily college-to-college connections. People there would telnet and ftp and read usenet, etc., but the average user couldn’t access this (and modems were not standard equipment in any case). The software usually worked on mainframes; you’d dial in and then use the software on the mainframe (lynx was the early web browser – still available for the PC, BTW).

There were also independent dial-up bulletin boards. These were run by individuals; each usually had a particular orientation (e.g., science fiction, adult, music, etc.) that reflected the interests of its owner. Many were only up part time, and often had only one phone line. You posted on the BBS like you do here on the SDMB, though without point and click, of course. There was also a way for BBSs to share their discussions with other BBSs – Fidonet (named, as should be obvious :wink: because it was first used by firemen). Fidonet took several days to spread around, mostly by computers trading the information with a nearby computer.

The third element were the information services. These were paid, commercial services that gave users access to BBSs accessible from around the country. You could also buy things from merchants who set up virtual stores. The first big success with this was Compuserve, but there were also Delphi, GEnie, Prodigy, The Well, and, eventually, America Online. Originally, you paid by the minute, but Prodigy introduced unlimited pricing (and a crude GUI interface). AOL had that deal from the start. The providers had many more features than the BBSs, but were not interconnected. You could e-mail someone else on the same service, but no one on another service. AOL found it easy to convert to an ISP; the others had various problems and are pretty much defunct (there is a Delphi discussion website and I believe also one for Prodigy, but neither is a big player). GEnie, my favorite of these, was strangled by its parent company GE and sold to a bunch of morons who ran it into the ground.

Both BBSs and information services (except AOL) died out as the Internet became common, due to the greater variety of the Internet.

19

For those who don’t know, AOL was originally a national Commodore network (Quantum Link), and later got into the PC market with the Tandy 1000 series (PC Link).

These days, “xtrek” is something entirely different. :wink:

20

Well, it looks like I was wrong. I have not seen a lot of posts by our HenrySpencer, but I did see a short exchange with BadAstronomer which referenced some events outside the SDMB (and which had to do with astronomy or space exploration). This gave me the wrong impression (and perhaps our HS deliberately wanted to give that wrong impression).