Category: Miscellany
Do you remember life before the internet?
What an interesting question, because many people mean different things when they say “the internet”. I believe most people believe “the internet” is synonymous with the World Wide Web, which came into popular use in the mid- to late 90s, after getting its start in academia in 1990. But the protocols and connections that underlie the World Wide Web, the thing actually called the Internet was born two decades earlier when Kahn and Cerf published their paper on packet-based intercommunication in 1974.
1974 is definitely before my first usage of internet technology. But in the mid 80s, I was definitely partaking of the BBS scene in the Bay Area, exchanging messages with other anonymous users, and downloading files over my mighty 1200 baud modem. I also dallied with the large commercial network services like CompuServe, GEnie, BiX, and AOL. I was a poor student living on my own, and certainly couldn’t afford to spend much time on those systems but I did see the shiny promise of a thoroughly connected world they held up.
My first encounter with the internet came in 1985 (before the WWW) when I took an internship at NASA’s Ames Research Center. There I had an email account and could exchange email with researchers and computer scientists around the world using “bang paths” where one would manually specify each server the mail should pass through. I used various internet protocols such as gopher, telnet, and FTP to get information and exchange data. I remember there being many other services accessible via internet protocols that are not in common use today.
By the time I started studies at Cal Poly SLO, BBSes still existed but so,e of them had moved to internet-based interfaces. And shortly after I started, the World Wide Web burst onto the scene, though it would be years before it would become as ubiquitous as it is today.
I guess this is my long-about way of saying that I do remember the internet before it became synonymous with the WWW. I fondly remember those years of being in the “cool club” with secret handshaking protocols. 😉
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