Memories of discovering the Internet
Brought about by this news item.
Mine was heading to uni in 1995. I studied Computing Science so I was in that nerdy area where we used the thing. I remember loading up Netscape Navigator and being amazed. Nothing like the multitude of websites we have now, but people created pages, and I could create pages after learning HTML. And Yahoo even had a catalogue of websites!
And newsgroups -- oh my! I could type some contribution to some insanely narrow interest group from Sydney and someone in California would respond almost instantly! It was amazing. Astonishing to me. Now I get grumpy if a colleague doesn't respond to a Skype chat or email within a few minutes...ha ha.
What are your memories? When and where did you discover this thing that now is so entwined in our lives?
Mine was heading to uni in 1995. I studied Computing Science so I was in that nerdy area where we used the thing. I remember loading up Netscape Navigator and being amazed. Nothing like the multitude of websites we have now, but people created pages, and I could create pages after learning HTML. And Yahoo even had a catalogue of websites!
And newsgroups -- oh my! I could type some contribution to some insanely narrow interest group from Sydney and someone in California would respond almost instantly! It was amazing. Astonishing to me. Now I get grumpy if a colleague doesn't respond to a Skype chat or email within a few minutes...ha ha.
What are your memories? When and where did you discover this thing that now is so entwined in our lives?
Comments
And needing to get help over the phone (at 50p or £1 per minute, following a lengthy wait to be connected) as follows:
"Can you log on to the Internet now?"
"No, because I'm on the phone to you".
"Do you have access to your computer now?"
"No, because it's upstairs in the study and I'm downstairs in the hall".
And then scribbling down a succession of keystrokes (which you barely understood), trying them out, failing to get the d+mn+d thing to work, and repeating the sorry process all over again ...
Dial up, of course. And slow, but I had email. I had some involvement in getting our email set up at work as well. We had dial-up there - it was emails only for most people.
There was a website about C. S. Lewis that I especially liked. His adopted son Douglas Gresham sometimes posted.
Anyone else recall using Kermit to FTP, get and put files?
Thanks! (I was afraid to google it
I started off with Janet in 1984, I even had two accounts that year, one for computing and one for philosophy. A friend had one out of interest and ended up inviting a guy from Cambridge to a ball. So yes there was technically aspects.
Then with my first job (1989) we had Pegasus mail which was run over many different colour books. My boss did not realise this until I started sending emails and he was quite sure I was hacking into machines.
When I started my current job (1993) there was the talk of web and gophers going on around work. My employer shortly afterwards had a web server running on an Apple Mac.
We had Lynx.
Me too. I loved it. All those character-based keystrokes that could do amazing things.
🤣
I think it was white text on a black background (or the other way around? -- perhaps you could flip?) when I used it from 95-98. I do not recall colours. But I recall using Netscape Navigator far more often when I discovered the joys of multimedia. 😀
Not entirely... If you got a good one and maintained it carefully, it was a transport of delight, a voluptuous beast, and very fast. Mine was red, so of course it was faster than the others. I had lusted passionately after one ever since it came out when I was a student in the 70s (now I am an old geezer in my 70s) and eventually bought one while working in Texas many years later. (David Steele had one - what higher recommendation could you get?) Sadly, the need to renovate it coincided with daughters being at university and a man in the Netherlands made me an offer I couldn't refuse, so away it went. A bit of a tangent, but LeRoc asked...
Doesn't your heart pound harder just looking at that? The last good looking car ever made.
LOL. I was a long-time holdout. Even still I prefer to learn keyboard shortcuts whenever possible.
More importantly, I first met my wife when the firm sent me to Leeds on an email course.
There again, when I first learnt coding on PCs (rather than mainframes) I didn;t think it had a future.
I have been coding on PCs for 20 years now.
Prodigy was a joint venture of IBM and Sears, and its purpose was to sell things to users. There were message boards, but in the early days nothing appeared until it had been vetted by a human being - and very arbitrary human beings they were, too. (A post of mine was rejected because I referred to the "Soviet empire;" the vetter said it wasn't an empire.)
They didn't start work until late afternoon, so having conversations was very frustrating. And we weren't allowed to discuss certain things, like religion. I got around that by starting a thread called "Anglican Church Music;" we found ways to work in opinions on other issues in the church as well.
Eventually, the corporate masters got frustrated with users' preference for conversation over shopping. Eventually, AOL became an option (and a free one), and I bailed from Prodigy.
And it's what Jesus drove:
Said child doesn't believe me, but those who were at a certain Midlands university which thought it was too posh to use its real location as its name will remember.
For data analysis, we had tapes like old time tape recorders for data storage. You took your tape to the operator and had then mount it for you. I certainly had newsgroup stuff on one of mine.
I was into short wave radio back then. Ham radio people would do slow scan TV pictures which you could receive as sound, record and run through an interpreting program. I ran it all through modules within Emacs. It was pretty cool to see photos from around the world.
There wasn't really web surfing. We did like to find FTP sites, mostly at universities and then begin to snoop around, reading research and data sets. No one really thought of security nor of commercialization. Email had started and we'd contact people with interesting stuff up and everyone enjoyed collaborating.
Lynx, the browser is still available for Linux operating systems. When web browsing started we were all using Netscape.
Our internet provider for home continues to be a publicly owned company (provincial gov't). Which also provides cellphone internet data. So still avoiding in part the commercialization.
I can't speak for Our Lord, but I'm guessing that the donkey was a better choice than a Triumph Herald.