ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet | Hacker News Reader

ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet

15 pointspwoods30 comments

I don't mean "when I used the internet, we didn't have mice, we had to click with our heads!" I mean do you remember the feeling in your chest as you discovered new things every day that blew you away as cool. Like discovering that your home town has a web site or that you could "Post" on-line and talk to people. Do you remember that feeling? I think it's like a drug because ever since I've been looking for that again and the best we got today is news about things outside the internet... i.e. blogs. Sites used to be about "Visit my Homepage" not they are "See the Celebrity news on my Blog". Do you miss the old days?

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Whew, that would be in 1972, as a frosh at Harvard, back when there were about 20-30 hosts on the ARPANet (the precursor to today's Internet) in the whole world.

I remember fondly telnet'ing from machine to machine (back then, most were PDP-10's running TOPS-10 or TENEX, and all had open guest accounts), seeing how many telnet sessions one could chain before something broke.

And I remember the first ARPANet mailing list, hosted at BBN (the inventors of email), which was about (recursively enough) email clients and mailing lists.

I remember sitting at a TTY (physical teletype--no CRTs yet) next to the IMP (the ARPANet node processor) late at night and getting calls from BBN to reboot the IMP if it hung. We had high-speed 56Kb leased lines to MIT, BBN and a few other local nodes!

FTP seemed like a miracle at the time, and we had access to a data store at CCA down the street which had an IBM data cell, which could hold gigabytes (which seemed infinite, given that our PDP-10 had 256K of 36-bit words and maybe a few hundred MB of large disk storage).

I certainly don't miss the days of Internet Exploder 3, or Geocities, or AOL domination, or ....

I certainly do miss the days before commercialization and marketization of the internet, when sites were genuine repositories of information and not cash grabs or click-thru whores, and you didn't get 100 times more spam in your inbox than legitimate email even after the filtering....

I remember, but it wasn't as significant.

This is likely because I used (and at one point ran) BBS'. We had FIDONet, CyberCrime net, Usenet gateways, phreaking, and other ways to communicate internationally. The Internet just made it faster and more graphical and allowed you to multitask.

I remember it was a lot of fun. My friends and I were geeks and we had these RPG clubs, where we pretend fight in AOL chat rooms.

It was like D&D, we all had a certain amount of health and used dice rolls to attack.

Someone even made a whole program out of it based on Final Fantasy, that kept track of health and automatically did dice rolls for you. It even had great music clips to go along with it.

Oh man, those were great days. Making fan sites of Final Fantasy and other games just for fun.

I'm glad my girlfriend doesn't read hacker news or she'd dump me.

That would have been about 1991. The web did not exist, or at least I wasn't aware of it, and for me the internet = Usenet. I printed out copies of something called The Terrorist's Handbook ( http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/terror.html ) and sold it for $5 at school (and in 1991, this was perfectly acceptable behavior. It didn't even occur to me that I could get in trouble for this). Mostly I read stuff like this on alt.tasteless: http://www.tocotox.net/bedtime/smut/beaver-and-mr-ed.html (Warning - do not click on that link)

But the internet didn't really make a big impression on me until I saw NCSA Mosaic (precursor to Netscape) on a Sun workstation a few years later. I knew the web would be huge.

I remember using the www at high school, you had to load up trumpet winsock, as windows didn't support tcp natively. This would be about '94 or '95 I believe. It was sort of cool, but at the time I was more into writing games in assembly so I don't think it grabbed me then.

The thing that really blew my mind was in University I got into talkers - chatrooms you visit by telnetting into them. Think the one I used to haunt was "The village". I was just amazed at how cool that was and trying to figure out how the hell it all worked and how you could write a server. I wanted to have my own chatroom. For me that was so much more useful and clever than what at the time were pretty static websites.

Now years later I sort of do with Mibbit ;)

Hey. I'm at Drupal Camp Chicago right now, we're all using Mibbit to follow the conference via IRC. Thanks for a useful product. http://drupalcampchicago.com/irc

Awesome :) Glad it's being used by people... You never know if people will use it, or prefer to use some HyperMicroBloggingLocationAwareWidget ;)

Ah, the days of the "local" freenet based out of Tallahassee. That was circa 1993-1994 for me. I was 14 in 94. We got our first actual computer with a modem, a Macintosh Performa 635CD. 2400 baud dialup modem.

The first time I connected to an online service was fun. My cousin was over and we had pooled our money($20) to buy the Internet Phone Book. Thick book filled with several thousand websites. It came with a CD that offered dialup access to a company in Portland. Obviously my mom had a problem with long distance fees, so we ditched that before we started.

I had no software to actually do a connection, but my computer came with Clarisworks. Clarisworks actually had a COM program built into it. I got the number for the Tallahassee freenet from my local library. After a lot of trial and error we were able to type in the right modem commands (ADTD... etc) and it dialed up. Woot, we were "online"!

Pretty quickly we figured out about local BBS's. Spent most of 94 and into 95 on those. By this time had upgraded to an actual telnet client. One of the BBS's also offered dialup PPP access. Finally got that working in late 94 and was on the Internet itself finally. My cd from the Internet Phone Book had a copy of Mosaic 1.0, so I installed that. Then we loaded our first webpage. Forget what it was, but it took forevvvvver to load.

Spent a lot of time over the next couple years on BBS's, then MUDs, and a LOT of time on IRC. As I upgraded modems over the next couple years access got a bit faster. GlobalVillage modems FTW! My first exposure to firmware was when my 28.8k GV modem was upgradable to 33.6 via a software update. Talk about me being a newb and having no idea how software could update hardware. =)

I remember realizing that I could use JavaScript to fake include()s so I wouldn't have to update every page on my crappy middle school website.

And back then no-one cared that it was anti SEO.

That was an amazing hack if you didn't have the ability to use server side includes with your crappy web host.

I can still remember the pain of writing document.write hundreds of times.

I first started using the internet back in '96. I think I was actually most excited about being able to play Quake online. But getting e-mails was kind of exciting, too -- as an actor in an AOL commercial said, it was like "getting a present".

* Making a web site when I was a wee tyke and being told not to mention my name, or my location, or my interests, because according to my father anything online would be used to stalk and kill you.

* Going on Newgrounds and being utterly awed; submitting something to Newgrounds and realizing that the people I fawned over were actually people.

* Going to my home town's message board and fearing for how incredibly stupid a lot of people sound online. Realizing that having a commanding voice online doesn't make you cool offline and vice versa.

Coming back from Europe in 87, to a small town in the Midwest, to realize that I was now a few keystrokes away from Europe -- via BITNET.

SLEEPY, where are you? I still remember your text files.

I remember when it was conspicuous when a corporation included their website addy in a commercial or in print or on the radio... now it is commonplace.

Cheers

I don't remember the first time. It was before the WWW existed. But I get that feeling more often now than I did then. These are good times.

My first Internet connection was a 56k dial-up connection out of, and I kid you not, "Bryan's Auto Supply" in the next town over. A quick Google search found them again. http://www.ebryans.com/

More though, I remember the fist fights between my older brother and I for who was going to get to use the connection.

I must have been 11 or so, and I remember having a brief instant message exchange with Hoon Im, one of the founders of Electric Gravity (they made "The Village", which Microsoft bought became the basis for what is now MSN Games). I don't remember exactly what was said, but after the conversation I started learning how to program. Good times

1998: Yahoo was the hottest search engine around, getting Hotmail was a rite of passage, Neopets was just about to become popular, and I was reading tech news from this gray-on-black website that let me tick off which websites I wanted to aggregate. (I miss that proto-RSS website.)

I remember the cost, how expensive it was to use the internet; Stories of people living in shacks while putting all their money to pay for the connection. I do miss Netscape navigator.

i remember when i ditched AOL in favor of free internet..

altavista was my preferred search engine.

*netzero, lycos, altavista were some of the people who offered free dial-up internet.

Further reflection -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268307

Ah, gopher, newsgroups, and muds....

On a vt220!

I remember how much better Mosaic was than Gopher!

And I remember being somewhat fascinated by a coffee pot...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot

SEFLIN FreeNet baby.

Pokemon!

Yes I do but didn't use WWW for a while. Before I used WWW I thought the Mouse was a useless invention and GUI applications were slow and tedious. To be honest I didn't think it would take of in this scale until the WWW. I understood after struggling with my mouse for a while that this thing is great invention, it will be useful for everybody not just developers.

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