Plus, on Windows 3.1, SLiRP/PPP + Trumpet Winsock was only barely usable for timelines and reasons I can't quite remember, so much of my internet life was through a shell account anyway; it made more sense to run Linux locally and have a native experience, rather than living on the internet through some piece of dialup modem terminal emulation software.
Though, after installing Linux, with only 4MB of RAM, rebuilding the kernel took 8 hours. I didn't actually realize this was abnormal, or that the drive thrashing I heard at the time was swapping rather than just normal code compilation.
It could start X, but only very, very slowly
At some point later I got a Cyrix 5x86/133 (o/c'd to 160) with 16MB. Probably around 97-98. At that point, the graphical web became a reality for me as well.
Otherwise, it was interactive stuff via telnet/ftp/usenet, and plenty of lynx for web.
Funny how that was such a signal back then. Did the program crash? Lets listen. No, I can still hear it, its just taking its time. I'm not sure how long it took for me to realize the noise was coming from the drives and that wasn't the sound a cpu under load makes. Maybe a cpu under load noise (or an increasing brightness light) would actually be useful in some contexts: no need to hop on and run htop just look from across the room.
For newcomers, a similar experience would be using the framebuffer and running slrn against the NNTP servers from https://www.eternal-september.org, using IRC (still alive too) and using trickle to throttle down your connection to 56k or ISDN speeds if you were lucky.
Oh, an MUDs, of course.
Today you can get a similar feeling with http://wiby.me with tons of personal sites.
Of course this device didn't actually exist in the consumer market. Half of my aunts and uncles worked for IBM and none of them knew anything about it. From cruising the YouTube comments it looks like a simpler version of the system had a few industrial applications but nothing remotely like the commercial. With AR glasses I think we're pretty much there nowadays but most people would rather use Robinhood and AirPods on an iPhone to do the same without bothering pigeons or looking like a weirdo on public transit.
What does the search engine prompt say? I couldn't read it.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19980208062232/http://www.hotbot...
Edit: seems like it only became kind of a search engine again in 2023 under completely different ownership : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotBot
Not only for the nostalgia, but for some topics, like som games or game genres, it can lead into amazing old internet clusters of sites full of fun/useful content (i.e. not just the ad/clickbate stuff everything turned into later, but real people just sharing because they wanted to share).
Most people used modems to dial up paying the local call rate (the ISPs got a cut of this so the longer you stayed on the more they earned) and as a result your computer was directly connected so people could (and did) portscan your machine directly.
Every site was http by default and only switched to https when you were going to buy something.
Web rings were a big thing and so was Yahoo. Search engines let you use search terms that were case sensitive (so "Python" got you comedy results and "python" got you information on snakes).
Big corporate didn't dominate then like it does now and it was a lot more fun, lots to explore and find.
The Summer before we did that, we had like, 2000 customers. Couple of small modem banks. A few racks of servers, which provided SMTP, POP3 (we weren't at IMAP yet), DNS, some webspace. We had a Usenet feed which was basically a cache from upstream, but those days were starting to look numbered. We also offered some gaming servers - Quake and the like.
I built the signup scripts which would also provision email addresses and webspace, and also get you hooked up on the RADIUS servers so you could dial in.
When the decision was made to go 0845, most of the team quit. There was basically like 3 of us left. And we needed to buy £500k of server parts and build them, get BSD installed and provisioned to do everything it needed, rebuild the RADIUS stack, provision a load of new bandwidth (we once diagnosed a rising packet error rate on a microwave link by noting the tree over the road had come into leaf, which we then fixed with a stepladder and a saw to deal with the specific problematic branch), all while just living Summer vibes.
We ended up buying a repossessed DMS100 switch to handle the phone lines, a ton of Nortel CVX1800s, figure out how to become a proper AS and get a BGP router sorted, and all while working from a portacabin in a car park next to the Cheshire farmhouse which acted as our data centre, which had such poor air con, at the start the ambient temperature regularly hit 45C.
Exhilarating. Genuinely, one of the best times of my professional life.
We worked so hard. We wouldn't get in until about 10am, but would then work to about 6-7pm, then head into the nearest major city where most of us lived (Manchester), go to the pub for a few hours and figure out what we were going to do the next day, and then go back and do it all again.
Being part of that movement where we went from ~2000 people paying £10/month to around 750,000 people dialling in whenever they felt like accessing the internet and providing exemplary service (our callout/support structure was based on us being benchmarked against Demon, Pipex, Freeserve, and so on, and we had to beat them on everything from modem negotiation time, DNS response, bandwidth, everything), and kind of seeing the start of the Internet becoming a popular thing in the UK was wonderful.
I met up with one of my ex-colleagues from that Summer this Spring, and we were talking about how much we would love to have that feeling once more.
It'll never happen, but wow, what a time.
Back during the dotcom craze, you could buy a pixel for $1. It was a 1000x1000 image, so the value was a million dollars. Some teenager did it.
Amazingly, it's still up. Although all or nearly all the links are broker or point to somthing different than what was originally there...
I wonder how the guy that created it managed to make it so viral that he sold out all of the pixels in a short time.
And it was magic compared with everything else that were around back then.
(In college on the side, I ran a tiny local ISP with a couple dozen Hayes modems connected to a Livingston Portmaster. T1 uplink. A couple PCs running Linux. Before college I had been hanging out on AOL giving technical advice, and before that was using an Apple II dialing into BBS's.)
Which is all to say, I was there for all of this and this piece is pretty much spot on.
When the movie Frequency (which has a communicating across time aspect) was made in 2000, the company the screen writers went to for how to get rich by investing in the right stock? Yahoo.
Headline story on mtv.com was Kurt Cobain was dead - I was like "Wow!". Guy I was working with was "yeah, it was in the papers a few days ago.".
It's an abiding memory, maybe has coloured my view of the rise of the internet, just sharing a dusty anecdote.
In 1989 when I started to use internet, someone being on the internet meant they could be trusted. Private internet did not exist, so all users were basically university employees. I visited people and invited people from other countries without knowing them. Sending a couple of emails, and everything was fine. I sent bills to a money collector overseas and the cheque was in the mail a couple of weeks later.
I only realized what usenet and IRC were when I first installed/booted a Knoppix CD that came with a computer magazine. Little did I know that it would brick the bootloader of Windows 98 at the time. But by then most usenet groups were already either flooded with spam, or dead. Most groups were lurking in IRC via bouncers all day long to not miss a message.
fuzzfactor•4d ago
Some of them had quite a head start too, considering Prince wrote the song back in 1982 ;)
PokemonNoGo•1d ago
asdff•1d ago
ghaff•1d ago
Personally, I was in Quebec City on a group ski and party trip :-)
washadjeffmad•1d ago
Only for a few minutes, but I'll never forget it.