8 ms·
I miss old internet so much.
by atum47 5y ago
I miss old internet so much.
- xtracto 5y agoBoingBoing (the source of this story) is one of those places that has withstood the test of time.
- rhacker 5y agoI think that's why we're on here so much.
- huhtenberg 5y agoThe sound of a modem handshake. The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up. A vending machine on another uni's campus replying to your pings. Hum of a computer lab with the hollow of elevated floor under your feet. Those linen floppy sleeves. Using finger. Plan files. To each their own, obviously, but welcome to nostalgia.
- bitwize 5y agoFinger, .plan and .project, talk, email, netnews... Unix was social media.
- anthk 5y agoTildes exist today with that premise. Bullshit free social collaboration and thinkering.
- ethbr0 5y ago(Leaving aside the obvious Usenet) Gopher. GIFs. Webpages hewn out of raw HTML by amateurs. The time before 56.6 modems were ubiquitous. Walking away while a webpage loaded. Everything text based (MUDs, IRC). University computers offering you power you could never afford at home. Leaving downloads running overnight. The wild diversity of non-Ethernet networks. Physical computer retail stores. ICQ. Self-hosted persistent gaming servers. Napster being new.
- asdff 5y agoOne thing that is better is that the university computers are xeon hpc clusters now and you can ssh to it from anywhere with anything.
- 0x456 5y agoEventually, a grumpy old man* will show up and mention teletype and time-sharing. Someone else will incorrect him saying cloud computing is different. I'd love to hear Peter Norvig and Bill Gates talk it over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ztdp70peU&t=115s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6Ztdp70peU&t=115s
- asdff 5y agoIt's still nothing like today. I could connect to the cluster with my phone in a gas station bathroom if I wanted to. Imagine telling people from the 1970s the sheer amount of computational power I can trivially call up today over the course of a bowel movement on the side of the road.
- tgtweak 5y agoI guess we're just going to gloss over how much of a terrible thing Novell Netware and Lotus Notes were to sysadmin :D
- smhenderson 5y agoWhat you call terrible I called job security.
- technothrasher 5y agoNo love for the internet Oracle? What else was one supposed to do late at night when they had a deeply meaningful question that just had to get answered?
- dakna 5y agoThere was always the option to send links to the Hampsterdance site to people that just started using Winamp to play music on their stereo. "Di ba didi dou Didi didldildidldidl houdihoudi dey douDibidi ba didi dou dou" on high volume goes a long way in the middle of the night.
- jkestner 5y agoThe whirl of a network cable bustling with traffic. https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technology/ https://www.karlstechnology.com/blog/designing-calm-technolo...
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago> The sound of a modem handshake Apropos of nothing, but one of the stories I love to tell during interviews was the discovery that a 2,400bps modem was faster than the 56kbps one. I was designing a "box" to read a group of switches and transfer that switch state information via modem to another "box" at the end of the phone line that replicated the switch on/off positions. During initial testing, I found out that with a 2400bps modem, my system could read the switches, dial the downstream modem and transfer the data and hang up before the 56k modems had even finished negotiating their speeds. Latency often trumps bandwidth!
- mey 5y agoSomething I had completely forgotten. I was writing a modem pool software server for a custom payment gateway back around 2004. Point of sale terminals would normally be configured for around 9600 baud for this reason. Payloads were typically small and link establishment was the priority.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoHa! I rewrote the CTOS serial protocol for the OS message passing link. It had been severely limited by fixed timers between polls, so going faster than 9600 didn't matter. I changed it to 'if you have a packet, send it. If you can't buffer a packet, NACK it'. Now we could run full speed (and full duplex!) It instantly became practical to log in remotely and use source control on our server. Which mattered to me, because I was remote-working. Anyway, nostalgia
- zinckiwi 5y agoVery neat. I recall in the dusty recesses of my mind various settings that you could pass to a modem at call initialisation to force certain speeds, modes, and other parameters. Did it have to be an actual 2400 baud modem or could you just "step down" the 56k for the same effect?
- nzmsv 5y agoUsually yes, with an AT command: http://www.messagestick.net/modem/Hayes_Ch1-1.html http://www.messagestick.net/modem/Hayes_Ch1-1.html Knowledge of AT commands is still useful today, but the modems are cellular: https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/introduction-at-commands https://www.twilio.com/docs/iot/supersim/introduction-at-com...
- pimlottc 5y ago> The whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up. Nothing beats a good degaussing, ah...
- jimmaswell 5y agoI still use a CRT alongside a newer monitor. The CRT is 1600x1200@75Hz and still looks great. It definitely took time for flatscreen to catch up.
- ancarda 5y ago>A vending machine on another uni's campus replying to your pings Really? Wow. I can't even ping internal AWS services (like the EC2 Metadata Service, NTP, or DNS). Nothing responds to ICMP Echo anymore, and it makes me sad. Lately it feels like `ping' has become useless Why are we doing this to ourselves?
- mr_toad 5y ago> Why are we doing this to ourselves? Ping flood attacks. A lot of the early protocols have had to be discarded because they had all the privacy and security of a postcard.
- WalterBright 5y agoI am not nostalgic for CRTs. Not even remotely. I sat behind one for 20 years.
- WalterBright 5y agoI have a laptop from the 90's that will still boot. I booted it up, poked around a bit, said "nahhh" and that was it.
- kloch 5y agoCats miss CRT's a lot more than we do
- kortex 5y agoReading this just gave me the sensation of turning on the Apple Macintosh (or something similar) in the school computer lab and feeling the hair on my forearm stand on end from the static. One time we stuck aluminum foil to the CRT screen and ran a wire off of it and zapped various objects and each other with the arcs. And of course the BWONGGG of degausing. Cathode ray tubes, what a hoot.
- oh_sigh 5y agoJust like with horses and cars, the old thing was not destroyed when the new thing came along side it. You can still ride a horse. You can still browse the old internet.