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[CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet

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  [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet RS Wood  <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-03-13 09:13 +0000
    Re: [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> - 2014-03-13 22:49 -0700
      Re: [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet Tim Watts <tw_usenet@dionic.net> - 2014-03-14 09:56 +0000
        Re: [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-03-14 22:04 +0000
          Re: [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-03-14 22:52 +0000
      Re: [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet Lewis <g.kreme@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> - 2014-03-14 13:45 +0000

#1550 — [CM] Ten recollections about the early WWW and Internet

From the «Veronica sexier than Archie» department:
Title: 10 Things I Remember About the First Time I Used the Web
Author: Harry McCracken
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 16:32:57 -0400
Link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/timeblogs/nerd_world/~3/zQen7WnMz-E/
Podcast Download URL: http://1.gravatar.com/avatar/d00b8afbf4bba3a317a55a6b0fae46e3?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2F1.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D96

As we celebrate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web today[1], I’d like
to say that I was smart enough to get on the web the moment that it was
possible to do so — which, if you weren’t one of Tim Berners-Lee’s colleagues
at CERN, was in August, 1991. But in truth, I was a latecomer, relatively
speaking. I didn’t surf the web until the fall of 1994, whereupon I
immediately felt embarrassed for not having latched onto it earlier.

Once I experienced it for myself, it made quite an impression. I remember
virtually everything about that first browsing session — why it happened,
what I did, even the conference room I was sitting in and the orientation of
my chair.

Would you mind if I got nostalgic for a moment? Or 10 moments, to be precise?

1. I was already an old pro at going online. I started dialing into online
services in either 1978 or early 1979, via a roaring 300-bits-per-second
modem which you connected to the phone line by sticking the handset into a
couple of foam cups[2]. Among the services I used early on were CBBS[3] (the
first bulletin board system) and the Source[4] (the first online service
targeting only consumers). I also belonged to CompuServe, GEnie, AOL and BIX
— maybe all four at the same time at one point.

2. I knew about the Internet long before I used it. My father worked at
Boston University, and had access to the service back when it was known as
ARPANET[5] and available only to government employees and academics. He raved
about it. I’m not sure why I didn’t beg him to give me a tour.

3. I remember the first time I heard about the World Wide Web. It was no
later than mid-1993, I think. My friend Bob Stepno[6], a more forward-looking
individual than myself, told me about it and described it as “point-and-click
Internet.” Again, I was intrigued but did not take any action to try it.

4. I remember what I was doing on the Internet before I used the web. I was
sending e-mail to people on other online services, for one thing — and yes,
there was an era when that was hot stuff. I also used information retrieval
services such as Gopher[7], Archie[8] and Veronica[9], all of which seemed
exciting at the time.

5. I remember why I tried the web. I’d just started working at PC World
magazine in Boston, and my boss, Eric Bender[10], thought we should know
about this stuff. (I believe that PCW was already working on launching its
own site.)

6. I remember who showed me the web. Pete Loshin, the guy who Eric hired to
do a little workshop for us. He’s still teaching people about technology[11].

7. I remember which browser I used.NCSA Mosaic[12], of course — the
definitive web browser until Netscape Navigator, which was just coming out in
beta, displaced it shortly thereafter.

8. I remember the first site I tried. Yahoo! Pete explained to me that it
made it very easy to find stuff on almost any topic, just by typing in a
quick search. The site was roughly 10 months old at the time, and was not yet
a full-fledged company.

9. I remember the first thing I did. I searched for Krazy Kat, one of my
favorite comic strips. I don’t remember how many results popped up — it might
have been as few as ten or so — but I was dazzled. (Today, the same query on
Yahoo gets you 258,000 results[13].)

10. I remember what I did next. I signed up with an early ISP — I’m pretty
sure it was PSINet, although I jumped around a lot for a while, and sometimes
had more than one account at a time — and never looked back.

So what are your earliest memories of the web?
[image 14][image 15]

Links:
[1]: http://time.com/21039/tim-berners-lee-web-proposal-at-25/ (link)
[2]: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mwkw6UGwalI/Uhg_Uj6LQPI/AAAAAAAABZU/mniY4XJj1uc/s640/Acoustic-Coupler1.jpg (link)
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBBS (link)
[4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Source_(online_service) (link)
[5]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET (link)
[6]: https://www.twitter.com/bobstep (link)
[7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol) (link)
[8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archie_search_engine (link)
[9]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veronica_(search_engine) (link)
[10]: https://www.twitter.com/ebender00 (link)
[11]: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=a9_sc_1?rh=i%3Aaps%2Ck%3Apeter+loshin&keywords=peter+loshin&ie=UTF8&qid=1394656116 (link)
[12]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) (link)
[13]: https://search.yahoo.com/search;_ylt=Ahd6TBjf5pZKe4JdCkZ9wT7O2FxH?toggle=1&cop=mss&ei=UTF-8&fr=yfp-hrtab-901&p=%22krazy+kat%22 (link)
[14]: http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=time.com&blog=1359921&post=21867&subd=timedotcom&ref=&feed=1 (image)
[15]: http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/timeblogs/nerd_world/~4/zQen7WnMz-E (image)

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#1576

On 2014-03-13 09:13:22 +0000, RS Wood said:
> So what are your earliest memories of the web?

I used Mosaic's first public release, and before that Gopher.  I had a 
university dialup account kindly loaned to me by a friend by 1992, 
coinciding with my installation of Linux for the first time on my fancy 
486 DX/33.  I used slip in order to use TCP/IP over dialup.  Back then 
I was using IRC, reading Usenet (but not posting) and downloading wares 
off FTP sites using Archie searches.  Back then, outside of academia 
and some very high-tech businesses, very few people had internet 
access.  By 1994 I had a real dialup account with Millennium 
Communications, the first commercial ISP in my area.  In those days 
there wasn't much to do with the web (ie http / html).  Similar to 
today, there was a bit of online shopping and a few time wasting sites 
with most of it being a vast wasteland of vanity sites.

I had an Apple Newton by that time, with an external modem, and jacking 
it into a phone jack and dialing up my Unix shell account was a pretty 
neat trick that always seemed to impress folks.

The future looked a lot less dystopian back then.  Gold was cheap, the 
dollar was sound, and we had a thriving economy.

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#1579

On 14/03/14 05:49, Oregonian Haruspex wrote:
> On 2014-03-13 09:13:22 +0000, RS Wood said:
>> So what are your earliest memories of the web?
>

1995. 10Mbit PC connection to university network (this is England).

Trumpet winsock.

Connection via JANET links to USA were shite. Get your webbrowsing done 
before the afternoon when all the americans got up. after 2pm or so, no 
chance.

No Google - had to use things like Yahoo (spit), Altavista (quite good 
for its day).

Really hard to find stuff. Downloading anything big took hours/days.


Home internet was crappy modem. Dialup tones. Flaky connection.

Later, ISDN at 2 x 64kbits, always on. Seemed like paradise. Ran my own 
email server from home. Booted by Plusnet (the bastards). Went to Demon 
Internet.

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#1623

On 2014-03-14, Tim Watts <tw_usenet@dionic.net> wrote:
> On 14/03/14 05:49, Oregonian Haruspex wrote:
>> On 2014-03-13 09:13:22 +0000, RS Wood said:
>>> So what are your earliest memories of the web?

1990: I was doing a degree in environmental things and wanted no part of
computers or the like other than typing up papers in the computer lab on
the Mac SEs (I still like those old beasts).  But I remember getting
weather reports off the gopher terminal in the university library, and a
new machine in the research section that allowed searching research
papers on WAIS - that seemed pretty incredible.  

But I had a buddy doing a degree in CS, and he had a map of the Internet
at the time.  Off in the corner was something called the World Wide Web
that didn't seem very wide at all.

Amazing how it all worked out.  And it's not over yet!

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#1627

In article <lfvudg$3d6$3@solani.org>, RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>
wrote:

> On 2014-03-14, Tim Watts <tw_usenet@dionic.net> wrote:
> > On 14/03/14 05:49, Oregonian Haruspex wrote:
> >> On 2014-03-13 09:13:22 +0000, RS Wood said:
> >>> So what are your earliest memories of the web?

Mine are of working for and with people who were busy putting up the
first web site outside Europe and being unaware of what they were
burbling about.

See here (f'rinstance):

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/history/earlyweb/history.shtml

-- 
"If you're not able to ask questions and deal with the answers without feeling 
that someone has called your intelligence or competence into question, don't 
ask questions on Usenet where the answers won't be carefully tailored to avoid
tripping your hair-trigger insecurities."                  - D M Procida, UCSM

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#1598

In message <lfu5a3$ojl$1@dont-email.me> 
  Oregonian Haruspex <bob_davis_retired@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On 2014-03-13 09:13:22 +0000, RS Wood said:
>> So what are your earliest memories of the web?

> I used Mosaic's first public release, and before that Gopher.

Gopher is not "the web". Neither is email, telnet, ssh, archie, finger,
talk, irc, ftp, rsync, UUCP, nor USENET.

-- 
If there's a bustle in your hedgerow don't be alarmed now.

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