The Internet before the Web – I was there, back in 1990. (I had rudimentary 'net access abck in '87 through BITNET, which had some gateways, but it was a store-and-forward network like the old FIDOnets, not the more real-time stuff like the Internet.
Gopher – a text-based hierarchical “browsing” system. There’s still some around, although most either died off between 1995 and 1998, or were just left running but never updated. Finding a working Gopher server is king of like stumbling on a subdivision near the airport that was abandoned years ago – all the roads and buildings are still there, but it remains, long forgotten and rotting away. Check out gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu.
E-mail – it hasn’t changed much. Even the forwards were thee. NO spam, though – nothing.
Usenet – NO spam, more intelligent posts (considering that most users were connected with academia and research). it’s how I spent the majority of my time. I still think the NeXTSTEP newsreader was the best ever made, and the easiest to use. In 1992 I sent out the control messages that created alt.planning.urban and alt.culture.ny-upstate.
IRC – yup, still there, although it was only on a couple of servers, and there were usually only a few hundred active “rooms” at a time. No graphical IRC clients, though.
Other diversions – there were a bunch of games that took advantage of the TCP/IP protocol, using either GUI or text-based interfaces. MUDs were common, as were chess, backgammon and Go servers.
In the “good old days,” the spirit online seemed to be “you get out of it what you put into it.” A very high percentage of the online community made useful FAQs, recipe guides, moderated mailing lists, created distributed computing projects, and so on, probably more so than those that have Web sites up today. Since there was no Web, and there was no personal Gopher pages, you didn’t see anything like the personal billboards that make up so much of the Web.
Whatever happened to the old net.gods, like Roger Carasso and Kibo?
Actually, there was plenty of porn in 1993. Several Usenet groups, such as alt.binaries.erotica, alt.binaries.blondes, … (I can’t recall all the different groups), had lots of porn. Of course you had to piece together a file from several Usenet postings, strip the Usenet headers, put them back in the correct order, and uudecode them to create a binary file. Did I mention that you had to walk to the computer lab uphill? Both ways??
It’s somebody’s law that any new transmission medium will immediately be used to distribute pornography. As soon as computers could talk to each other, worms and viruses emerged, too. The early Bell Labs UNIX networks had a hell of a time with one particular incarnation of the infamous “cookie monster”. From one of the jargon dictionaries:
Somebody made the damn thing replicate itself through the Bell Labs machines. Every time they thought thay had it squelched, some sysadmin would miss it, and it would start propogating again. They finally had to reverse engineer a counterworm which propogated itself the same way, but did nothing, and made the real one think the machine was already infected. It was designed to stop running on a specific date by which time only the “benign” worm would exist. Before my time, but I heard the tale many times from earlier employees.
It’s somebody’s law that any new transmission medium will immediately be used to distribute pornography.
I’ve heard this before, but this statement is hardly correct for many media. Certainly not the telegraph or phonograph records. With early telephone service, you couldn’t be assured that an operator wasn’t listening in, and it was many decades before phone sex arrived. Radio had no privacy, and has virtually never been used for pornography. TV was around for decades before VCRs made porn possible, and even cable was around for many years before it added sex channels.
