Ship of Fools: 25 years of the WWW

Thread: 25 years of the WWW Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

The WWW is now 25 years old!

What are your first memories of the Internet?

I was an 'early adopter' and had a PC and email before any of my friends or family (they laughed at me and many said they'd never be interested!)

I remember the familiar dial up tone.

I remember the whole computer being wiped (often) by a geeky friend whose only way of mending any glitch was to format the hard drive.

I was ICT coordinator at school in the early days - I loved easing people into familiarity with the new technology.

My computers/laptops have always cost me around £1000 and I've had a new one roughly every four years.

£6000 well spent I reckon!

Posted by leo (# 1458) on :

I remember going to an internet cafe and learning how to use a search engine. It was dial up and kept timing out so I decided it was too slow/useless and i was not going to bother with this internet thing - ever.

Posted by Lord Jestocost (# 12909) on :

Getting a daily update of new sites: you could, just about, keep up with the web.

Studying the HTML of pages I liked to see how it was done.

The thrill of truly starting to grok the whole hypertext concept and realising that the web page of a magazine (I was managing editor of 4 journals at the time) does not have to be a replica of the paper version.

Oh, and the happy, innocent days before mass take-off of Altavista, and then Google, when sites had pages specially given over to links that the owner found of interest.

Discovering The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5, which I think was the first site to use the web to engage the audience of a TV series. Through it I discovered the IMDB, another good thing.

Posted by Spike (# 36) on :

The company I worked for offered an online dial-up support service. This really was the dogs bollocks in 1990. We had one customer who didn't understand it though, so would use his computer to dial the normal switchboard number and then shout at the computer in the hope that someone would hear him.

Posted by TheAlethiophile (# 16870) on :

Ah, the incredible 'boing-boing' sound as the dial-up connection worked. It took about 45 seconds to work. I used to have a rubik's cube next to the computer that I would fiddle with while I waited for a webpage to load.

Then I discovered a virtual rubik's cube which was infuriating as you could never orient it how you wanted and you would accidentally rotate a section while you were simply trying to see the other side of the cube.

Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :

So it was seven years old when I read about a professor at Purdue posting a video of him using liquid oxygen and a cigarette to melt a mini grill. I cut the article out of the paper, marched into the computer lab, showed it to some student assistants, and asked them to show me how to find this video. Several hours later, after much slow searching and loading, we found pictures, and eventually the video.

These kids growing up with broadband and youtube don't know how easy they have it. It used to take hours to watch one video of something blowing up.

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

We used Netnorth which was the Canadian part of BITNET. This linked universities together. You would dial a phone number and then place the receiver in a cradle which connected to a computer. This was before windowing, and simply had a line prompt

code:

 $ <type command here>

Most of what we did was communicate with others doing research and look at newsgroups. FTP files of data back and forth. For newsgroups, I recall particularly rec.arts.startrek. I don't think most ISPs even carry newsgroups any more, though it might be something to return if the NSA etc keep challenging electronic communication.

My first home computer was a 8086 which ran a version of MS-DOS. At that time, there were competing operating systems including TRS-DOS and VAL-DOS (Radio Shack and Compaq I think). My computer cost somewhere in the neighbourhood of $3000 in the early 1980s, but I had a partial grant to get it. Two 5¼" floppies and no hard drives in those days.

Posted by Caissa (# 16710) on :

I remember a friend FTPing to a few websites and it taking minutes for the site to appear.

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

My first memory of the internet was when it appeared as green text on a green IBM screen. You had to enter a string of commands at various prompts to get it to connect. There were no pictures. There wasn't much about. The few people who were on email (nobody I knew locally) sometimes had strange email addresses like 157398.763@compuserve.com. I hung out on newsgroups, mostly soc.penpals - years later, I'm still good friends with the Norwegian penpal I met through that.

At work we got computers that had Netscape 1, which displayed the internet in something like 16 colours, swiftly replaced by Netscape 2 with a wider range of colours, possibly 256. I remember being awed that I could sit at my desk and email someone in another country and get a response five minutes later.

My first computer was an end of range Compaq which I must have spent about £250 on. I felt really intimidated by it at first and had cold feet about how much I'd just spent. It had dial up so I'd be online for half an hour in the evenings - access a page, quickly disconnect, read and compose a post at leisure then connect again. It lasted me for several years before I had one built for me for about the same price which had broadband capability. Eleven years later I'm still using it, though it struggles a bit with some sites now.

Posted by cattyish (# 7829) on :

Computers were toys to me when I was a child. We had a Spectrum ZX at home (I know, spoiled brat) which had a "learn to type" programme on it and an instruction manual so I could make it say "Hello" to me all the way down the screen until I pressed... was it escape?

It was at university that a nice lad set me up with Ytalk. It was all new and meant I could in theory talk to more than one person at once, but I only knew one other person who used it.

Searching the medical literature was done with paper indexes or the CD-ROM bank in the medical school library. If someone was already using it you had to wait.

The Ship was my first real internet addiction. It was a way of socialising when up at the wrong times of day for my friends outside this world. I used chat rooms a bit too for the same reason. It might be 8am and me just in the door and having my evening meal, but someone would want to talk.

Right now I just did a lengthy search for costume patterns, and I'm about to check the weather forecast without having to get up.

Cattyish, grateful for the technology, somewhat bemused by its growth.

Posted by PeteC (# 10422) on :

I trained as a librarian and libraries were at the cutting edge of computer communication back in 1972 (I remember I took a course on The paperless society and believed it for a while. I still giggle at their predictions)

In 1972, I was using a adapted TTY to link up to the university computer to access CAN/OLE at the National Science Library. You could search for scientific articles you wanted, then send a snail mail to them ordering a microfiche copy. We thought we had died and gone to heaven.

We also used the said TTYs to practise our PDP-DEC system 10 programming skills.

One of our rare book courses dealt with an on-line input of a Perfectible Milton Bibliography. I got a footnote in that book because I discovered a hitherto unknown variant edition of Comus. [Yipee]

Ah the glory days!

Our baud rate was 150 bps. Incredibly fast!

Posted by Nicolemr (# 28) on :

Libraries may have been cutting edge, Pete, but we didn't get internet access at mine til '95. I got involved with my first discussion site, and I've never looked back.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

I remember in the 70s when a "computer" was the huge mainframe which was housed in the "computer room" (i.e. a room for one computer) at my university. We didn't touch it, just marveled at it and felt important that we went to an institution worthy of having such a beast.

In the 80s I worked for a small non-profit that joined up with some similar organizations to qualify for a grant from Apple that set each of us up with our own Apple 11's-- my first introduction to computers. Even though most of us just wanted the computers so we could do word processing and bookkeeping, as part of our grant requirements, we had to communicate/ network with one another via AppleTalk regularly. It was slow, difficult, arduous work. We would end up calling each other on the phone and trying to talk each other through AppleTalk over the phone.

Posted by Baptist Trainfan (# 15128) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Spike:
The company I worked for offered an online dial-up support service.

Ah the fun of getting support (at £1 per minute). The computer was in the bedroom upstairs, the phone was in the hall, and of course you had to go off-line in order to phone for help. The guy on the other end never recognised this and would say, "Is your computer connected to the Internet?" So you had to scribble down meaningless geeky instructions as fast as you could, then try them out and, when they didn't work, go back to the phone and start all over again ... (still at £1 per minute).

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

I think I must count as an earl adopter, having had internet for something like 20 years. Pre-broadband, pre-google (altavista was my first search engine), pre-amazon (I remember fondly The Internet Bookshop, who had the right idea, but just too early).

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
I think I must count as an earl adopter

Excellent. Which earl have you adopted?

Posted by Jane R (# 331) on :

I've always had a soft spot for Haakon the Crazy myself... mainly because of the name.

I was an early adopter too, I suppose, through working at a university library. Ah, the excitement of trying to download catalogue records from OCLC over a dial-up connection... but the fond memories I have are of ordering books from W H Smith's online bookshop before Amazon strangled all its competitors.

Posted by cheesymarzipan (# 9442) on :

not my story, but funny anyway:
stick your floppy to the fridge with a magnet

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
157398.763@compuserve.com

Ah, yes. Who else remembers Compuserve? Connecting over a modem at 300 baud and watching the letters scroll by on the screen. Upgrading to 1200 baud and thinking it couldn't possibly get any faster than that!

Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :

About twenty years ago, Son-Unit heard about a local network from his friends. IIRC, it was basically a small chatting facility. The teens all loved it. When my son first hooked my computer to the phone line, my main concern was that I would get some outrageous bill from the phone company. No need to worry, it was free.

Little did I know how the internet would become so indispensable in such a relatively short period of time. But, of course, I can stop anytime. I'm not hooked. [Roll Eyes]

Posted by Moo (# 107) on :

quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I remember in the 70s when a "computer" was the huge mainframe which was housed in the "computer room" (i.e. a room for one computer) at my university. We didn't touch it, just marveled at it and felt important that we went to an institution worthy of having such a beast.

My daughter, now in her forties, remembers her father lifting her up so she could look at the mainframe through the glass window.

Moo

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:
157398.763@compuserve.com
Ah, yes. Who else remembers Compuserve? Connecting over a modem at 300 baud and watching the letters scroll by on the screen. Upgrading to 1200 baud and thinking it couldn't possibly get any faster than that!

Its somewhat higher-tech offspring, CIX, still exists. The second-oldest existing online social network in the world. (The Well in California beat it by a few months). I've been a member for, er, um, well over 20 years. Maybe 25.

Posted by Lord Jestocost (# 12909) on :

In all the excitement engendered by the white-hot technological flame of broadband, FTP, Netscape etc at work, signing up to AOL at home was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over me. Their in-house browser couldn't handle concepts like using HTML code to size images, and listed the contents of table cells as sequential lists. Their FTP could handle one file at a time. I was forced to realise that not everyone Got It ...

Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Ariel:

quote:
Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
I think I must count as an earl adopter
Excellent. Which earl have you adopted?

It was Lord Lucan. Actually, still is. In my attic.

Posted by aunt jane (# 10139) on :

quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:
I remember in the 70s when a "computer" was the huge mainframe which was housed in the "computer room" (i.e. a room for one computer) at my university. We didn't touch it, just marveled at it and felt important that we went to an institution worthy of having such a beast.

My school had a "computer", actually just a terminal attached by some sort of ?telex? link to a university computer 20 miles away. The school's terminal ran on ticker tape. The ticker tape reader made so much noise my friends and I used to believe the senior maths teacher (the only person allowed in its room) was operating a construction site dumper truck in there

Posted by aunt jane (# 10139) on :

I'm told that in the event of thermonuclear war the internet will not work. So what will happen if I still want to post on Ship of Fools?

Posted by TonyK (# 35) on :

In the event of a thermo-nuclear war, if you live in the South-East of England, you are unlikely to be in any fit state to access the Ship, regardless of the state of the Internet [Big Grin]

Posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe (# 5521) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Lord Jestocost:
Signing up to AOL at home was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over me.

You could rely on getting a diskette in the mail at least once a week with the AOL software on it. Of course you promptly reformatted the thing and used it for something else. Never had to buy floppies.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by cliffdweller:

In the 80s I worked for a small non-profit that joined up with some similar organizations to qualify for a grant from Apple that set each of us up with our own Apple 11's-- my first introduction to computers. Even though most of us just wanted the computers so we could do word processing and bookkeeping, as part of our grant requirements, we had to communicate/ network with one another via AppleTalk regularly. It was slow, difficult, arduous work. We would end up calling each other on the phone and trying to talk each other through AppleTalk over the phone.

To further date this reference... The non-profit coalition I was working with were all arts agencies. I remember we all kinda secretly resented that we had to do the AppleTalk networking to qualify for the grant, and thought the notion that anyone would ever want to talk this way (over the computer) when you have phones and a perfectly good mail system was ridiculous (we all had big budgets for postage and volunteers to sort bulk mailings). We just couldn't imagine this would ever catch on.

We were brought up to the Mother Ship (Apple in Cupertino) for training, which was cool, and meant that we got to meet all the other grant recipients. Most were small community-oriented non-profits like us who were in it for the free computers and didn't see much use for this "networking" thing-- just a troubling nuisance we had to put up with the qualify for the grant.

But one group was all about the networking-- a group of medical researchers from around the country who wanted to be able to share data in real time. They were doing the very initial rudimentary research into the just then emerging AIDs epidemic and wanted to be able to share what they were learning (not much at that point) as quickly as possible, as they saw their patients dying off with so little hope at that time.

[ 13. March 2014, 22:34: Message edited by: cliffdweller ]

Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Amanda B. Reckondwythe:

quote:
Originally posted by Lord Jestocost:
Signing up to AOL at home was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over me.
You could rely on getting a diskette in the mail at least once a week with the AOL software on it. Of course you promptly reformatted the thing and used it for something else. Never had to buy floppies.

Preschool teachers made fantastic art projects with them. [Big Grin]

Posted by Trudy Scrumptious (# 5647) on :

Aww, I made my first personal website in 1995, to celebrate our upcoming wedding.

I remember being on "the internet" a bit before that, posting in usenet groups, but it was definitely making that first terrible, terrible crappy website that stands as "the beginning of the internet" in my personal life history.

Posted by Kelly Alves (# 2522) on :

heh, my ex decided he was going to strike it rich by doing something called "website design." That plan sort of fizzled when he actually had to deal with clients.

I remember when chat rooms used to show the text while someone was typing-- no option for second thoughts! Boy am I glad that changed.

Oh, and remember when Yahoo! divided the search criteria into "web pages" and "web sites"?

[ 13. March 2014, 23:48: Message edited by: Kelly Alves ]

Posted by aunt jane (# 10139) on :

quote:
Originally posted by TonyK:
In the event of a thermo-nuclear war, if you live in the South-East of England, you are unlikely to be in any fit state to access the Ship, regardless of the state of the Internet

You don't say. By the way, I can wholeheartedly recommend a visit to a place called Kelvedon Hatch in Essex. It's fascinating.

Posted by Porridge (# 15405) on :

I remember trying to teach my first, last, ex-, whatever husband how to email someone. He kept stopping and waiting after every sentence, expecting a reply, like on a TTY. He never did learn.

Posted by cliffdweller (# 13338) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Porridge:
I remember trying to teach my first, last, ex-, whatever husband..

*tangent* Kristin Armstrong refers to her ex (Lance) as her "wusband".
: [Snigger]

Posted by Net Spinster (# 16058) on :

I guess I'm early 80's on what was then the arpanet (work related). My first contact with the WWW was coming across a reference somewhere (can't remember whether it was usenet or through gophering) about something CERN was playing with so downloading and compiling the web browser (text only) and running it from a terminal to see what could be seen. I stuck with gopher for awhile until Mosaic came along (1993). I can remember the excitement of waiting to see the pictures of Comet Shoemaker-Levy hitting Jupiter in 1994. I had my first web site up by May 1994 at the latest.

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

Hmm. From the Repository of All Knowledge:

quote:
Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction[25] of the Mosaic web browser[26] in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the U.S. High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, one of several computing developments initiated by U.S. Senator Al Gore.[27]

Whoa, Al Gore really did have something to do with it.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

Like him or not, he saw the potential long before most, especially most politicians.
I think Bill Clinton chose him as a running mate out of gratitude.*

*Not quite worksafe.
ETA: But funny, regardless.

[ 20. March 2014, 04:21: Message edited by: lilBuddha ]

Posted by The5thMary (# 12953) on :

Ah, the internet! It was my undoing... I was in college in Seattle, struggling to get through two years of graphic design courses. I had diagnosed A.D.D., along with chronic depression and was having a lot of problems just getting motivated to get through some of my classes. And then... (dramatic pause), one day in a computer lab, when I was supposed to be working on some tedious design project, I stumbled onto Netscape and was enthralled. Hour after hour after hour, when I was supposed to be doing schoolwork I was surfing the internet.

Posted by W Hyatt (# 14250) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Hmm. From the Repository of All Knowledge:

quote:
Scholars generally agree that a turning point for the World Wide Web began with the introduction[25] of the Mosaic web browser[26] in 1993, a graphical browser developed by a team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (NCSA-UIUC), led by Marc Andreessen. Funding for Mosaic came from the U.S. High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative and the High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991, one of several computing developments initiated by U.S. Senator Al Gore.[27]
Whoa, Al Gore really did have something to do with it.

In 1996, a colleague at Bell Laboratories excitedly showed me this new Mosaic browser he had just discovered. We all routinely used the internet at work, but it was immediately apparent that the Mosaic browser was a huge leap beyond anything we were used to.

Posted by Timothy the Obscure (# 292) on :

My first browser was Lynx, which was text-only and ran under DOS. But before the www proper, there was Gopher, which seemed miraculous--you could access computers all over the world, though you had to go through endless layers of menus to get where you were going. We had it when I worked in the University of Michigan Graduate Library in 1991-92.

Posted by Jengie Jon (# 273) on :

For those of my era this is the world that was our first insight into computing and what would become the Internet. As a first year undergraduate at a University I had two accounts: one for Philosophy on the Arts Server and one for Computing on the Science Server. With these I learnt to do basics such as edit files, programme, get the print out for the course work. I was not adventurous, a friend with an account used it to talk(chat) with a postgrad in Cambridge who she invited to a Ball.

Jengie

Posted by Ariel (# 58) on :

That's a blast from the past - I remember Lynx and Gopher.

I also remember being amused by a letter that the postroom didn't know what to do with. It was addressed to Janet Email.

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

I still use text-based web browsers. But I tend to use wget because its so easy. There are some other Unix tools that are useful as well, and sometimes I write my own programs to access web pages(usually in Perl) My favourite one is a Perl object library for manipulating Google apps - I write code to change other people's passwords [Snigger]

(though in a domain I administer)

Posted by geroff (# 3882) on :

It was probably in about 1992 that Greenbelt had a strange tent with something called the internet being demonstrated. And then I met someone on Iona who worked for Digital in marketing the Internet to big companies. I don't think I knew what he was on about but it did seem pretty lucrative!

Posted by mousethief (# 953) on :

Did anybody here use Archie and Veronica?

Posted by MSHB (# 9228) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Did anybody here use Archie and Veronica?

I remember reading about those guys in the old funny picture books they used to have ... comics! That's it.

I began using public networks with FidoNet in 1993. The Fidonet server I contacted had lots of free files downloaded from the Internet. I was looking for a free Unix clone, and some guy called Linus was offering a free Unix-like kernel named after himself. Downloaded it but couldn't get it to work. It was version 0.95 IIRC.

By the time I got to the real internet a year or two alter, it was all WWW - I didn't need to learn archie or veronica.

Posted by PeteC (# 10422) on :

quote:
Originally posted by mousethief:
Did anybody here use Archie and Veronica?

The both of them.

Posted by Pearl B4 Swine (# 11451) on :

And here I thought this was a thread about Wonderful Welease Woderwick's 25th birthday.

Posted by lilBuddha (# 14333) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Pearl B4 Swine:
And here I thought this was a thread about Wonderful Welease Woderwick's 25th birthday.

This is a Ship, not a Tardis.

Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :

quote:
Originally posted by lilBuddha:

quote:
Originally posted by Pearl B4 Swine:
And here I thought this was a thread about Wonderful Welease Woderwick's 25th birthday.
This is a Ship, not a Tardis.

Awwwwwh!

Posted by mark_in_manchester (# 15978) on :

My first memory is accessing dodgy home-made guitar tab, typed up in text characters, using FTP in 1994 from a university research lab. I was on the hunt for Bruce Cockburn.

Not long after I was able to confirm the existence of a pair of proper music books of his I'd heard rumour of in a magazine, but never been able to find a bookseller to locate for me. Never felt like phoning Canada (who to ring?) to find out for myself, either. And suddenly (when a 'proper' browser arrived) I could not only order them, but compare sellers' prices and decide whether I wanted premium or standard delivery. Amazing.

I also remember a BC fan site I think was called 'humans'. It's funny how exciting it was to talk to fans of something hitherto really obscure that no-one else you knew was into. And how quickly one ran out of things to say!

That's really changed something about life - one's esoteric interests, book or record collection can now just feel like a small local manifestation of a much larger 'reality' which is the web. I sometimes catch myself remembering that my life, however much smaller, is nevertheless more real...

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