Heh. My dad (and everyone else in his university department) used Pine I think up until 1998.
I can’t believe such a world-changing thing occurred in such a short period of time. Basically between 1995-2000, it just went ballistic, and moved from “for weird geeks only” to “everybody”. And now it’s nearly impossible to live a modern life without its influence.
And we were there to see it all happen.
People still use pine now–I know my SO does. I used “elm” until I graduated in 1998, and I wasn’t even a computer science student or anything.
I miss Pine. I think I’ll look into seeing if I can use it with OS X terminal. Just for novelty’s sake.
As a student who graduated in 2001, I know I still used pine right up until graduation. English major, too. 
Google was the first website. But its usefulness at that point was limited because if you searched for any term except “Google” you got no hits.
I remember that. I started the second website just to give it something to do. It got popular after that.
I remember when “internet” seemed (to us university folk) like a poor and uneducated cousin to BITNET, which ruled.
I was ahunter@sbccvm on bitnet but ahunter@ccvm.sunysb.edu on internet.
To compose email, I would Kermit (remote-connect) to the IBM-3090 mainframe, which was running VM, and from the command prompt type “mail ADDRESS” where ADDRESS would be STRING if it were a local recipient, or STRING@BITNET or STRING@machine.domain.topleveldomain.
The entry screen did not wrap at the end of lines. you had to hit a downarrow like an old-fashioned typewriter’s return-bar to indicate that you’d like the cursor to drop down a line. I don’t remember for sure if you also had to left-arrow your way back to the left margin or not. There was no formatting.
File attachments were uploaded to the mainframe AFTER converting them to plain text. Being a Mac person, I used BinHex, industry-standard for Macfolk back then. The IBM VM itself used ENCODF but nothing else did. The PC (DOS, Unix, and early Windows) folks used UUEncode. You would upload your UUEncoded or BinHexxed file, then, from within your email, drop to the prompt and type a command that would append the attachment as text at the end of your email message.
On the other end, the user would recognize the characteristic
====================
(This file must be converted with BinHex 4.0)
…and realize the necessity of saving the email as a plain text file and then de-BinHexxing it, usually by running Compact Pro or Stuffit and navigating to the file and selecting it. It would cleverly ignore the email portion of the email (headers and all) and just decode the BinHex and lo and behold, on your Desktop would appear a file! Usually it would be a compressed file (.cpt or .sit or some such thing) and you’d then have to expand it.
I assume the PC folk did something similar with UUEncoded file attachments.
Email programs that you could deploy directly on your home computer itself – thusly requiring you to actually have your own freaking IP address, however temporarily – seemed to come along later, although folks on the cutting edge might have had them for years before I was aware of them.
FidoNET was one of several hundred. The reason Fido was so big was because the network could be accessed by most BBS systems, regardless of what software they were running.
All of the BBS software developers had their own proprietary network and it was used to communicate between members of that particular network. The message boards were often linked among different networks.
I ran VBBS and our network was VirtualNet along with a couple of other local networks. There was a VirtualNet server, which was another BBS that shut down for maintenance between around 3 am and 4 am each morning, just allowing the other BBS’s to connect and gather the network feeds. It acted as a local hub, which would then connect to a regional hub which would then connect to a national hub. The national hub would connect to various other hubs in other countries.
The server BBS then connected to a national BBS that connected to other servers, etc.
If you posted in a message board, it might take 24-48 hours for everybody else in the world on that network to see the post, but they eventually would see it.
At one point, I was connected to WWIVlink which was a link that was set up so that non-WWIV (World War IV) BBS’s could share info with the WWIV network which was pretty widespread at the time.
I even connected with FIDOnet for a while.
At that time, none of these networks were connected with the Internet in any way, shape or form.
But if you wanted to send an e-mail to someone across the country or around the world, all you had to know was their username or user number and the node of the BBS that they connected to.
If you wanted to send me an e-mail, you could connect to any VBBS bulletin board in the world that was a member of VirtualNet and my e-mail address would have been “1@1504012” or “Ziggy Stardust@1504012”.
1504012 was my BBS’s network address on VirtualNet…the 504 indicating my area code and 012 was just a unique number within my area code. I don’t remember why there was a 1 in front of it, but it might’ve indicated that I was in the USA. The 1 before the @ sign was my user number on my BBS…1 was always the SysOp. If you didn’t know my number, the “Ziggy Stardust” was my username and would work just as well…and yes, there was a space in there, no_underlines…this caused compatibility problems once the internet came around and I don’t remember how we worked around that. Other people who dialed into my BBS had a similar address with a user number somewhere between 2 and 500 or their username with the @1504012 after it. It wouldn’t be instant like e-mail is now since various servers would have to connect together via modem before the message would get to its destination.
My FidoNet and WWIVlink addresses were similar…there was almost always the area code in the node number since it was an easy way to categorize the BBS’s. And 1 was used almost universally to indicate an address within the United States. Fido used Z1 in their internet address to indicate Zone 1 for the US.
Later on, Fido connected to the internet and offered a real internet address which worked the way Bricker mentioned. Then a little later, that capability came to most BBS softwares where you could associate a domain name with your node number and provide internet e-mail to your users.
At some point, most of the BBS’s also had the ability to bring UseNet groups to their message bases.
Anyway, I hope this all makes sense. I haven’t messed with this since 1995 and I started this post almost 6 hours ago, interrupted by a few hours of work on my car and a few margaritas. I’ve probably over-simplified a lot of it, but you should get the basic idea.
When was the first porn image ever put on the internet?
ASCII porn. 
I forgot about Winsock. I remember having to download Trumpet Winsock from a BBS when I got my first SLIP account.
Configure TW to dial into the number of the ISP along with a bunch of other settings and it’d dial up and connect. The screen would show the different modem commands and then a bunch of garbage. You’d minimize Winsock and open Netscape…I think this was before MS Internet Explorer existed…we’re talking Windows 3.11. Eudora was my mail program of choice. CuteFTP was used for downloading files. And MIRC was a new 16-bit program used for online chat.
I had a CompuServ account early on…there was an offer on paper that came with my original 2400 baud modem. I logged into Telix or Telemate and it was a non-graphical BBS type of thing. They came out with their GUI not long after that but I never used it.
What about ANSI graphics? I know someone who understood how the ANSI codes worked and could make graphics by manually keying in all the codes without a special editor.
Wasn’t it a B&W photo of a girl between a couple of faux-Grecian pillars with a very excited phony?
I so hope I didn’t flub that literary reference!