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I'm 21 years old, but I feel like such a child since the first thing I thought was "Was the internet really that difficult back then"?
by tsestrich 17y ago
I'm 21 years old, but I feel like such a child since the first thing I thought was "Was the internet really that difficult back then"?
- blogimus 17y agoYou youngins got things easy. In our day, we had to search uphill, twice. No simple Google search, We had to gopher to get our documents. When we finally did get HTML, it was simple. No flash, nothin' fancy like that. But we did have blink. Just plain old web pages like the Model-T, we could have whatever color we wanted, as long as it was black. Cascading style sheets? Ha! And the speed. Today you got it easy with cable and fiber and wifi. Them were slow days I tell ya, 14.4k modem. Felt like a thirsty man walking across a desert and have to drink water through a capillary tube...
- jedc 17y agoOh, my god. A gopher reference! I spent many, many days in school trying to find cool sites with gopher and via anonymous FTP, generally without success. That's what happens when you get your coding assignments done too quickly... That said, we did have a frame relay, which was state-of-the-art for a high school at the time.
- iamelgringo 17y agoGopher, are you kidding me? We would have loved to have something as nice as Gopher when I was a kid. When I was your age, we didn't need any stinking search, because if you couldn't find the file you needed on a single sided 5 1/4" floppy disk you wrote it down wrong on the label, and you had to find the right file your floppy was on. I also the delirious joy I experienced on getting my very first 1400 baud modem. It took me weeks to figure out the right protocol settings to get it to dial and connect to the local BBS. Within days of figuring that out, my father stormed into my bedroom because the phone line had been busy for 3 hours, and I was banned from using the modem for weeks. He'd just seen the movie War Games and was worried that I might try to hack NORAD or something. Sigh.
- timcederman 17y agoYou mean any colour so long as it was the dingy standard grey, right? http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/osxmosaic.gif http://www.floodgap.com/retrotech/machten/mosaic/osxmosaic.g...
- abalashov 17y agoI'm 23, but I still remember fighting with Altavista and Excite to try to get anything even remotely relevant on the web. Google certainly transformed the utility of the web overnight for me.
- defunkt 17y agoDon't forget Metacrawler!
- antidaily 17y agoand HotBot
- arithmetic 17y agoAnd using Netscape Navigator. Remember that one?
- philwelch 17y agoI remember when Netscape Navigator practically was the Web. "Yeah, there's this thing called the Web, you use a program called Netscape to access it". It's kind of like the relationship between PDF and Acrobat when they came out together, or the way PowerPoint is the only slideshow software most people know of.
- aarongough 17y agoor DogPile!
- zackattack 17y agoLycos!
- abalashov 17y agoRest assured, I have not forgotten any of those. :) But my personal tools were conservative - Lycos, Altavista, Excite. That's why I was wary of and didn't initially buy into this newfangled so-called "Google" bandwagon.
- petercooper 17y agoI remember first seeing the Internet and thinking "How can you load two different things at once? Surely the phone line is dedicated to downloading one thing at a time?" .. a childhood of BBS use had spoiled me ;-)
- etherael 17y agoIt must be some kind of z-modem hackery. (my earliest self explanation for the phenomenon that I too, noticed from a few years messing about on BBS') :)