[Closed] interwebs old guard

Long enough to know the difference between the Web and the Internet. (-:

Does it count if I was using the internet before there was a web?

I'm more interested in the WhatsApp shenanigans

Ooh 33.1 modems and newsgroups.

Mid 90's can still hear the dial up tone in my head. I remember when social medja was called chat rooms.

I love the information super highway.

Started dicking around online in 95

Ahhh the good old Demon internet days 🙂

I had a gravis ultrasound and tbh all you tended to do was download the latest driver from a bulletin board as the thing would never work, just like the USR Sportster ISA card soft modem thing 🙁

My phone bills were a lot dearer then 🙂

It's funny thou being a pre-webber.

I had one of the the SE macs as well as the 300b modem that was a fantastic thing.

When I got my first PC in 93

I supppose that put me in the 1990's, had a spectrum when they were first launched when i was in secondary upper school,in the last months of the lower school we had a spanky new zx81 for about 200 hundred of us to learn on lunchtimes from the manual that came with it.

'94 for me when I decided to try with a Demon account, as I got hold of a TCP/IP stack, dialer and browser for my Amiga 1200, after using BBS's for a few years on my various Amigas.

Wtf is a local WhatsApp group?

CompuServe logins here. I still miss when pages were just html and didn't jump around for the next minute after you land on them

'92 doing searches of academic publications in the uni library.

Email 1991 at uni
Browser 1993 at work
Both on really nice sun workstations, they were lovely.

**** me just think, the functionality of a web browser could be fully understood by a single person then 🤣

Wtf is a local WhatsApp group?

Have a guess.
I reckon you can work it out if you try really hard. 👍

I used a Pr1me at school, back in about 1983 I guess.

We had terminals hooked up via a set of phone lines at 300 baud or so to a server that had been donated by Harwell Research, presumably left over from designing nuclear power stations or something.

YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A
SMALL BRICK BUILDING. AROUND YOU IS A FOREST.

A SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND
DOWN A GULLY.

Who knew it would get so weird from there?

CompuServe and dial up modem, waiting for those pics to slowly reveal themselves.....!!!

This interweb stuff is ok, but I cant see any of it catching on tbh

My earliest memories are Jo Guest photos slowly appearing...

Head...

Boobs...

No vag...

Try image 21...

I first got Internet access in my first year at university, so either late '93 or early '94. Towards the end of that academic year I encountered the World Wide Web via NCSA Mosaic and the text only Lynx browser.

The other thing that dates me on this matter is that like Cougar I still spell Internet with a capital I.

I went to the same uni as ChrisL but in '96, and it was literally the first year where you got it automatically rather than having to have an academic reason. But we were still supposed to restrict personal use (of any kind) to 30 minutes a day IIRC, to avoid overheating the tubes. LOL. Luckily by that time it was modern-ish browsers etc (and everyone had a really strong opinion on what browser to use), you didn't need to have any actual ability.

When I went back to work at the same uni, I found that of all the "eeeee when I were a lad" stories I'd tell the kids, that was the one that freaked them out most. Then double whammy it with "I lived off campus, so I used to cycle in sometimes just to send an email". Though, we did get the internet at home a while later- obviously had to have it delivered in the mail on a CD though.

Email - '89 (cix) iirc. But obvs that was internet not www.

A friend was asked by T B-L to work on the very early development of the WWW but, being a real physicist, wasn't interested!

OH (who never chucks things out) thinks the original letter signing on with Demon is still around somewhere. (Yikes).

I certainly remember when email lists and usenet groups where where all the good stuff was - that would have been mid 90s.

Mid-late 90s I opened a Rocketmail email account which I still use now. I didn’t really use it until 2000 when I went of backpacking, it seems daft to sell the virtue of email in 2020 as it’s pretty much a dead format for personal communication but it was witchcraft in 2000.

Unbelievably now, I didn’t get my first work email account until 2005 or so, in fact despite being a small regional office of a major bank we didn’t have an internet connection until then. We worked on PCs but everything had to be printed and sent by courier to HQ every night, a system which remained until around 2007 or so, the bank didn’t trust the internet. They rolled out a new multimillion pound CRM system in 2007ish that was based around the system reading barcodes off documents being faxed... madness.

1990 - worked in Post Office Research developing services turning email into post. Used to communicate with other postal services by email which took so many forms to get signed off.

Northwind
I went to the same uni as ChrisL but in ’96, and it was literally the first year where you got it automatically rather than having to have an academic reason

Thankfully my tutor signed the form granting me Internet access without even asking me to stutter out my flimsy so-called academic reason.

I remember when forums were bulletin boards and trolls only lived under bridges.

Will you get off that internet, I need to make a phone call lol
Freeserve chat 30 somethings (when I was in my 20s)
ASL?

Ahhhh, sigh.

94, Pegasus email account at uni, propping up the bar at the virtual blarney whilst doing fortran 90 coursework.  Then getting work accounts and finally at home where my housemate would spend too much time on steak and cheese...

#kcal and I worked for a company that was a hypertext pioneer. In 1990 Tim Berners-Lee asked us to turn our product into the world's first commercial internet browser. We turned him down. Couldn't see how to make any money out of it 🙂

Though, we did get the internet at home a while later- obviously had to have it delivered in the mail on a CD though.

Playing 'Multi User Dungeon' text-based adventure games at Uni in 91. Found it mind blowing to be playing a computer adventure game with other people playing at the same time. I was quite stoned most of the time which probably added to the sense of wonder.

Very early 90s (may even have been 1990 - certainly pre '93) - Apollo Internet BBS account which allowed full internet access, then moved to Demon a few years later. Usenet / BBS based until this html thing caught on.

alt.binaries.pictures.....what??!!?

My first modem was 14400 baud - I thought it was worth the premium over 9600.

(The above ignores the 300 baud acoustic coupler (=shoebox on m1 for Python fans) that we used during "Computer Studies" at school in ca. 1981 - Moon Lander - Your velocity is XX m/s. Enter burn time..? )

Mid 90s.

Pipex
Compuserve
Freeserve
AOL
C&W
NTL
VM
Talk Talk
VM

This thread makes me happy.

My mum was the local Amstrad agent back in the mid-late 80's so we had their latest kit set up at home for her to demonstrate or take to be demonstrated. My dad also had one in his office up in town so mum used to send him shopping lists, occasionally me and my sister would send requests for sweets or a magazine! Must have been about 7 or 8 as dad moved office in 1990. We didn't have proper home internet though until 1996, spent the first few days burning though the data limit looking at Mini forums/newsgroups/message board/whatever you want to call it. Think the last group and the forum it morphed into only died a few years ago so could be 20 years on the same forum!

About ‘97 when I also bought my house.  Used it for online gaming to thanks to BT Livewire, I built up some huge phone bills.

'92 at uni for the internet, and the start of a mis-spent youth in technology. I do sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had actually done a degree related to computing, but that quickly passes.

Back then it were all NCSA Mosaic and Sparc IPXs. Them were the days

1994 would have been my first experience with a Web Browser at home as that was included in OS/2 Warp.

Since before JANET was famous for being Jackson’s sister.

Newsgroups... still on the tandem@hobbbes listserv

Not that long, late nineties, but I was only in primary school and have grown up with it. Seeing middle aged and older people who have only got online properly in the last few years using social media now is often pretty terrifying. My mum in particular completely lacks nuance in her tone online.

B'doink.

1992 at uni.

My brother used to use bulletin boards on an old Acorn in I would say the late 80s. I never got involved that much but I was aware of it. Mainly for into forums etc in the late 90s. The internet was better when it was only for nerds.

1995
ISP: Direct Connection
28.8 Global Village modem
Power Mac 7200/90 ram 8mb
Mac OS 7.5.2
Reliant on SyQuest Drives to send ‘large’ files

Learnt early on, don’t argue on the internet.

1996, but it was a bit crap so I didn't really use it for much beyond email until the noughties.

Have got a sweet Hotmail.com address to show for it though.

Probably about '95 for myself; up until then I didn't have a job that paid well enough to afford dial up.

All the Demon talk reminds me that I ended up looking after the back end of them in my THUS days; having the ability to troubleshoot your own home internet connection from the LNS onwards was a bonus. BTW- it was usually DNS that went down for Demon, it was the core of many faults, and when Google created their public DNS servers it helped. Richard Clayton was an incredible programmer, thinker, and all-round good guy- they all were.

I can't work out all the timings exactly but....  working for Big Blue

early 90's liased and worked with CERN regarding browsers and hosting

Implemented early IBM web content for the EMEA Software Business including first on-line selling in conjunction with the IBM Software Distribution Centre in Denmark.  Taking on-line secure payments was the main challenge in those days.

Worked with Netscape with their Navigator browser. They came over to the UK and worked with us. Some of the main players in Netscape came from NCSA Mosaic. Son of Netscape Navigator is Mozilla Firefox.

A couple of fun things...created, ran, hosted and updated daily the first website that the Giro d'Italia had.

Also did the website fo the big Lyngby Rock Festival in Denmark.... these were sort of PR activities.

Also did the website fo the big Lyngby Rock Festival in Denmark…. these were sort of PR activities.

I meant.... the Roskilde Festival

First heard of it in 1983 at University, but it was only for Computing Science students. Got on myself in 1995. Memories of Usenet back then was of behaviour similar to today's trolls but it was seriously condemned. AOL addresses could get you seriously flamed as well. Ahhh the days when it was a nerdzone.

At home with Demon, maybe 86/87. We also had a modem at work to send files to the states, but not the internet, until I used my Demon account at work, before we had an IT department that knew about PC's, instead of mainframes!
Just used it for email (not sure who else I knew had email at the time) and newsgroups, obviously all text based in MS-DOS.

SQL Windows support on CompuServe using a 2400baud modem. Then Mosaic, Netscape 1.0... and now here we are

My involvement with the interwebs was accelerated when I was recruited by a huge ISP to bolster their news operation in 2001.

We still had to use HTML to publish pages at that stage, but it still felt like I'd missed the boat in terms of getting in on thr ground floor.

It was over that next decade that it really boomed, and I suppose I did ride the wave a bit career-wise and in terms of doing fun new stuff editorially.

Things started to change in the mid-to-late noughties as the big social networks gained ground and began to dominate the online experience, taking revenue and traffic away from standalone sites.

I'm glad to be out of commercial online editorial now TBH.

My dad has been mucking about with it since his apprenticeship in the late 70's.
When he finished a few years ago, his office which was the size of a small bungalow, was what housed one of the computers when he started.

I am thoroughly incompetent with it and still ring him for all issues with it.

Anyone remember "The Microsoft Network" from the mid-90s?

Basically Microsoft's classic proprietary strategy in which they ignore perfectly good standards and try to convince people to join their locked-in abomination.

This time not even an advert featuring 90's star Ross and Rachel from Friends could persuade the masses to abandon the Internet.

More details at the link below.

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-microsoft-network/

The depressing thing is that, 25 years later, Microsoft are still trying the same trick (MS Teams clients unable to join meetings hosted on other services, proprietary audio/video codecs etc.)

Was online before there was an internet to go online to, earliest was Prestel pages via dial up modem in the mid 80s...

I love how popular IRC Slack is.

It's amazing how much investment and buy-in you can get for a decades old protocol. Just by adding a nice GUI and marketing it as a new product.

I still use 'proper' mailing lists and IRC for most work-related issues. Not used newsgroups much for a while.

I've always been a stickler for plain text email and used to make a point of bottom-posting. I've given up now, things have moved on and people think me an arse if I reply in plain text and/or bottom-post.

So it seems that Slack no longer has an IRC gateway. But my last post still stands historically.