5 ms·
There were lots of things like the Internet (in this sense) before the Internet. Go look at Genie, Prodigy, America Online, the Well, BBS systems, and many more
by wrs 5y ago
There were lots of things like the Internet (in this sense) before the Internet. Go look at Genie, Prodigy, America Online, the Well, BBS systems, and many more. All centralized systems that were displaced by the decentralized Internet, which has since become much more centralized.
- qsi 5y agoObligatory mention of [1] Minitel. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel
- anthk 5y agoPeople have been repurposing Minitels with some resistors and a wire to create "cheap" vt100 compatible terminals. https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/from-trash-to-treasure-how-to-resurrect-a-minitel-terminal https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/from-trash-to-t...
- Someone 5y ago1967: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Editing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_Editing_System was internet in some sense, too, even though it was centralized and, one might say, not even ‘net’, let alone internet. A year later, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Retrieval_and_Editing_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Retrieval_and_Editing_Sys... got a bit more ‘net’ (https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-05-23/hypertext https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-05-23/hypertext has a movie about it that is worth watching but unfortunately doesn’t show how it worked). At least, it supported multiple terminal types. That page also claims “FRESS still runs on the current Brown mainframe.” Iet would be amazing if that were true. Software that’s over 50 years old.