4 ms·
I think I started using the Internet in 1990, and I was at the center of "GopherSpace". Email was the killer app, but otherwise it was only slightly useful for
by flomo 8y ago
I think I started using the Internet in 1990, and I was at the center of "GopherSpace". Email was the killer app, but otherwise it was only slightly useful for "information sharing". I recall pulling some US Census data, using a gateway to the university library catalog mainframe, and downloading Macintosh System 6 disk images. The entire AP wire was on Usenet too. But email was the real cool thing, you could communicate with your professors or friends at other colleges, or even meet people in bars who would give you their email address. This is when long-distance phone calls were like $1/minute so it was revolutionary.
Usenet was a slow-moving discussion board consisting mostly of college students where you could argue about computers or Star Trek or whatever. The most popular group by far was "alt.sex". Most people posted with their real names, but when my friend posted with a female name, she quickly acquired a stalker. (Who was dealt with by being banned from the Internet by his college's sysadmins.)
By the time Wired magazine was a thing and I wanted to start using the World Wide Web, Netscape 0.9 had come out and I guess corporations had already gotten their hands on it.
I still have a printout of "Zen and the Art of the Internet" [0]. Check it out if you want to get an idea of what using the pre-commercial internet was like.
[0] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html
- josho 8y agoUsenet was incredible. For me it was like discovering Hacker News, but not just on a single topic, on any topic I could imagine. For those that never used Usenet it was a distributed point to point discussion system. Through your client you would download any updates of the forums you subscribed, and uploaded any new posts/replies. The server periodically synchronized with other servers. Because of its distributed and assumed trust nature there were no built in safeguards to combat spam. Over time spam increased, a tolerable amount at first. But, the problem grew until it killed the utility of the service. The closest analogy to usenet today is Reddit. Where we've normalized spam into a tolerable number of advertisements. Where we've traded off distributed systems to a single corporate control. The distributed nature meant you had multiple competing clients, corporate control today means you access through whatever mechanism the company authorizes. I miss usenet.
- flomo 8y agoI miss pre-commercial Usenet too. But I think it was a completely different feel than HN/Reddit. You could surf the net for a couple hours, engage in a long-form argument, forget about it and come back a couple days later to reply. It wasn't like this where I'm replying to your "28 minutes ago" post. Also the environment was completely different. When people talk about Linus Torvalds being mean, there were a lot of people back then who had the mentality "I'm going to flame this moron off the Internet." I like the more friendly confines of HN. My take is Usenet was not so much killed by spam, but the lack of moderation. Eventually the unchecked kooks, flamers, stalkers, and etc made it uninhabitable.
- saltcured 8y agoWe had both aspects. Even on Usenet, some groups were so active and internet-connected that you would see the threaded discussion exploding around you in the minutes it took to write a reply. Others were more like putting a message in a bottle and checking back each day to see if a reply was floating back. In university, I also remember we had informal protocols for upgrading a conversation from email or newsgroup to more real time via shared systems on campus. We would use "talk" and "ytalk" to have something more instant than instant messaging... you would see each letter as the other party typed, rather than only seeing one chunk of text per enter key. One student group also used the MOTD on a shared system as a communal bulletin board, hosting elaborate chats a bit like graffiti tags answering each other.
- jackfraser 8y agoI miss ytalk. Back in the day, a friend and I would essentially make our own RPGs over ytalk - one of us would be the game leader and would describe what happened like the perfect text adventure (which understands context and makes reasonable assumptions). Being able to see the other person type in realtime made it that much more fun. Simpler joys for a simpler time.