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It's always fascinating seeing the internet catalog and consolidate knowledge, especially regarding events that occurred pre-internet. Back when these events h

It's always fascinating seeing the internet catalog and consolidate knowledge, especially regarding events that occurred pre-internet. Back when these events happened, a blurb appeared on TV news and in papers, but there was no easy way to get the big picture as the investigations evolved.

kingcharles 5y ago
I love that the Internet allows closure on pre-Internet mysteries that might not have been practically solvable before. I recently managed to track down some people online and between us we solved a late 90s mystery that would have been very annoying to solve back then and had bugged me for over 20 years. Closure is such a beautiful thing.
- _blu 5y ago
  what mystery? was it about time travel?
mattl 5y ago
This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987. EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.
- post-it 5y ago
  Sure, but pre-"everyone is online always". Even things that happened in 2005, at the start of Reddit and Digg and well into the reign of MySpace, weren't summarized and consolidated as efficiently as they are today.
  - mattl 5y ago
    Sure. But we don't describe pre-smartphone as pre-telephone.
    - steviedotboston 5y ago
      yeah i dont see whats so hard about speaking accurately.
      - notreallyserio 5y ago
        This is funnier than it should be.
    - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
      So what's your suggestion? Instead of "pre-Internet," we're supposed to say "pre-widely-available Internet?" Yeah good luck with that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- h2odragon 5y ago
  BBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of RBBS hosts. There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but they were pretty restrictive with their feeds.
  - mattl 5y ago
    I mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics and others using the internet.
  - rufus_foreman 5y ago
    I had a C64 and my mom bought me a CompuServe starter kit at some point in the 80's. I think it was something like $6 an hour off-peak and over $20 an hour during peak hours, which might not even include long distance charges depending on where you were. That would be $20 an hour off-peak and over $60 peak in today's dollars. For 300 bits per second. For practical purposes, the internet did not exist for people like me until the mid-90's.
    - mattl 5y ago
      For practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.
      - rufus_foreman 5y ago
        If a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era. Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.
        mattl 5y ago
        I'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone basically costs way more than that. Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not mean it didn't exist.
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  The internet effectively did not exist in 1987. Even the most tech savvy people didn’t have access. That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.
  - mattl 5y ago
    Public access starts in the late 80s with things like The World and Netcom, but people were posting on the Internet in the 1980s. There's http://olduse.net http://olduse.net where you can go and read old USENET posts from the era.
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Right. And I had access to it at my university in 1988.
  - caymanjim 5y ago
    The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s and 80s, and into the very early 90s, when he was one of the first politicians to embrace and push legislation for it. He was definitely influential in its adoption and proliferation, insofar as politicians are important in funding all these things, and acting as evangelists. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article[1] about it all. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
    - mattl 5y ago
      Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that, > As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.
- FredPret 5y ago
  I think the internet era is generally taken to be from 1995 on
  - mattl 5y ago
    That’s the rise of the web though. 1995 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with browsers preinstalled.
    - FredPret 5y ago
      It’s not much of an internet without mass participation though
      - notakio 5y ago
        As someone who was online in 1987, I've found the internet significantly less enjoyable as it has become filled with "regular people", hoping to share the knowledge they don't have with people who didn't ask for it in the first place. While I get what you're saying, there was also a time and place where you could wonder aloud how to do $technical_thing_x on $platform_y and get a knowledgable, competent response from a skilled professional who had done that thing. Now, we sift through thousands of pages of sloppy copy pasta, of unknown pedigree and unknown efficacy. Was that for the best?
        pomian 5y ago
        or go to HN, and ask.
        ohyes 5y ago
        don't ask, simply answer the question you have wrong.
        FredPret 5y ago
        The bulk of humanity have been endowed with sci-fi superpowers thanks to Wikipedia, Google, Google Maps, remote work, shopping from home, etc. As for the nerds who lost their online paradise? They are now in insane demand, earning eye-watering salaries and company valuations, and rising to the top of the social ladder. It’s not perfect, but it is bloody good.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Wikipedia: > Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.
asdff 5y ago
People actually used to save stories that were interesting or cut them out of the paper, or go to the library and read a book on the subject. Fastforward to today, with the world at their fingertips, and who even saves anything anymore? It's all transient information on the web today. That interactive nyt article you might have bookmarked a few years ago has probably link rotted by now. If it wasn't for wikipedia cataloging information in a central, stable place, we'd be in a new dark age.
- Retric 5y ago
  Internet archive is doing actual archival work. But at an even more basic level old methods to archive stuff are still in active use.
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    > Internet archive is doing actual archival work. SPA-all-the-things takes care of that.
    - Retric 5y ago
      You can archive SPA’s, the vast majority aren’t worth the trouble.
- laurent92 5y ago
  A lot of people save clips nowadays. Especially since the ideology wars are visible in every phrasing, people keep it “as proof” and upload compilations to Youtube. It would be interesting to see if this behavior stopped if Youtube didn’t allow to “broadcast yourself” anymore. I’m sure Tiktok would take over but it is much more ephemeral.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  A few of us (and probably a disproportionate number on this site as compared to the general public) undoubtedly download and archive interesting material for just that reason. I wish there were a very good conversion utility to download sites and convert them to PDF, especially for Mac. If there is one, I don't know about it. I've resorted to either printing the "reader" version to PDF from Safari, or copying and pasting into a word processor.

kingcharles 5y ago

I love that the Internet allows closure on pre-Internet mysteries that might not have been practically solvable before. I recently managed to track down some people online and between us we solved a late 90s mystery that would have been very annoying to solve back then and had bugged me for over 20 years. Closure is such a beautiful thing.

_blu 5y ago
what mystery? was it about time travel?

mattl 5y ago

This wasn't pre-Internet though. This happened in 1987. EDIT: "the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983" -- people who know more about this than you.

post-it 5y ago
Sure, but pre-"everyone is online always". Even things that happened in 2005, at the start of Reddit and Digg and well into the reign of MySpace, weren't summarized and consolidated as efficiently as they are today.
- mattl 5y ago
  Sure. But we don't describe pre-smartphone as pre-telephone.
  - steviedotboston 5y ago
    yeah i dont see whats so hard about speaking accurately.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      This is funnier than it should be.
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    So what's your suggestion? Instead of "pre-Internet," we're supposed to say "pre-widely-available Internet?" Yeah good luck with that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
h2odragon 5y ago
BBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of RBBS hosts. There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but they were pretty restrictive with their feeds.
- mattl 5y ago
  I mean, some people were using BBS but there are academics and others using the internet.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago
  I had a C64 and my mom bought me a CompuServe starter kit at some point in the 80's. I think it was something like $6 an hour off-peak and over $20 an hour during peak hours, which might not even include long distance charges depending on where you were. That would be $20 an hour off-peak and over $60 peak in today's dollars. For 300 bits per second. For practical purposes, the internet did not exist for people like me until the mid-90's.
  - mattl 5y ago
    For practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.
    - rufus_foreman 5y ago
      If a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era. Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.
      - mattl 5y ago
        I'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone basically costs way more than that. Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not mean it didn't exist.
setpatchaddress 5y ago
The internet effectively did not exist in 1987. Even the most tech savvy people didn’t have access. That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.
- mattl 5y ago
  Public access starts in the late 80s with things like The World and Netcom, but people were posting on the Internet in the 1980s. There's http://olduse.net http://olduse.net where you can go and read old USENET posts from the era.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Right. And I had access to it at my university in 1988.
- caymanjim 5y ago
  The popular, misguided jokes about Gore "inventing the Internet" come from the work he did in Congress in the 70s and 80s, and into the very early 90s, when he was one of the first politicians to embrace and push legislation for it. He was definitely influential in its adoption and proliferation, insofar as politicians are important in funding all these things, and acting as evangelists. There's a pretty good Wikipedia article[1] about it all. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
  - mattl 5y ago
    Of Gore's involvement in the then-developing Internet while in Congress, Internet pioneers Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn have also noted that, > As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.
FredPret 5y ago
I think the internet era is generally taken to be from 1995 on
- mattl 5y ago
  That’s the rise of the web though. 1995 is when operating systems for PC and Mac start shipping with browsers preinstalled.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    It’s not much of an internet without mass participation though
    - notakio 5y ago
      As someone who was online in 1987, I've found the internet significantly less enjoyable as it has become filled with "regular people", hoping to share the knowledge they don't have with people who didn't ask for it in the first place. While I get what you're saying, there was also a time and place where you could wonder aloud how to do $technical_thing_x on $platform_y and get a knowledgable, competent response from a skilled professional who had done that thing. Now, we sift through thousands of pages of sloppy copy pasta, of unknown pedigree and unknown efficacy. Was that for the best?
      - pomian 5y ago
        or go to HN, and ask.
        ohyes 5y ago
        don't ask, simply answer the question you have wrong.
      - FredPret 5y ago
        The bulk of humanity have been endowed with sci-fi superpowers thanks to Wikipedia, Google, Google Maps, remote work, shopping from home, etc. As for the nerds who lost their online paradise? They are now in insane demand, earning eye-watering salaries and company valuations, and rising to the top of the social ladder. It’s not perfect, but it is bloody good.
kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
Wikipedia: > Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the Computer Science Network (CSNET). In 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP) was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.

asdff 5y ago

People actually used to save stories that were interesting or cut them out of the paper, or go to the library and read a book on the subject. Fastforward to today, with the world at their fingertips, and who even saves anything anymore? It's all transient information on the web today. That interactive nyt article you might have bookmarked a few years ago has probably link rotted by now. If it wasn't for wikipedia cataloging information in a central, stable place, we'd be in a new dark age.

Retric 5y ago
Internet archive is doing actual archival work. But at an even more basic level old methods to archive stuff are still in active use.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  > Internet archive is doing actual archival work. SPA-all-the-things takes care of that.
  - Retric 5y ago
    You can archive SPA’s, the vast majority aren’t worth the trouble.
laurent92 5y ago
A lot of people save clips nowadays. Especially since the ideology wars are visible in every phrasing, people keep it “as proof” and upload compilations to Youtube. It would be interesting to see if this behavior stopped if Youtube didn’t allow to “broadcast yourself” anymore. I’m sure Tiktok would take over but it is much more ephemeral.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
A few of us (and probably a disproportionate number on this site as compared to the general public) undoubtedly download and archive interesting material for just that reason. I wish there were a very good conversion utility to download sites and convert them to PDF, especially for Mac. If there is one, I don't know about it. I've resorted to either printing the "reader" version to PDF from Safari, or copying and pasting into a word processor.