Back in the early days of The Internets, there were no World Wide Webs, no Tubes of Yew, no Books of Faces… not even any Spaces of My. In fact, there were no images whatsoever, with the possible exception of a very few low-resolution images — strangely, none of which were of kittens speaking poorly-formed English — that could eventually be downloaded, if you were willing to dedicate your weekend to tying up your phone lines. For each image.
And yet, somehow we still managed to find a way to entertain ourselves, make ourselves laugh, and meet new people. Back in the pre-Web days, after I migrated away from terrible local BBSes, I played around on Telnet games, which were the period equivalent of MMORPG’s. At the time, they were known as some variation on a MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) or MUD (Multi-User Dimension). I met some fantastic people on there, some of whom have remained my friends through the many permutations of the Internet that have followed, and some of whom can be tracked down on my Facebook today. Funny how I still think very highly of these people, so many years later, when so many other real-world friends have come and gone.
Oldbies, sound off. What part of the Old Internets — ie pre-World-Wide-Web — do you kinda miss?
ARPANET. It was ours, we didn't have to share it, and didn't have all of these snot-nosed kids on it. See what they did when they got a hold of it? Bastards.
If you don't want us to call you old why do you keep going on about AARP?
Isn't it time for you to go shave again? Don't forget to separate your eyebrows.
Good tip, I'll try to remember that. Any tips for my well forested arms?
<img src="http://images.canadianlisted.com/nlarge/antique-eureka-push-mower_5227031.jpg" width="200" border="2" style="border:2px solid black;" alt=" " />
I am totally buying you one of these:
<img src="http://www.mycomeup.com/web/images/stories/carnegie.jpg" width="250">
Bah. Like you're the first one to think of that, Clever Dick.
And since when have you bothered to read what I write? It's kind of creepy…
You posted pictures, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered.
I became moderately wealthy after authoring a letter telling people how to MAKE.MONEY.FAST.
There are very few times when I actually want video. I don't want to watch a video to get a movie review; I can read much faster than most videos can get to the point. I want to read instructions so I can review them quickly, instead of searching haphazardly for the exact second with the detail I need. I can predict whether text might have some useful information pretty much at a glance, but with a video I'd have to watch the whole thing.
Yes, and with video you usually get bombarded with the crappy music that the author felt was necessary to make his or her point. Wankers wanking noisily.
It's been what, nearly a week, and you're still upset about that Three Dog Night song?
Oh gods, don't remind me.
/I am looking for something nice for you. Snookums.
I miss waiting an hour for a blurry jpeg of I'm not sure what to download. Everything is too easy now.
Grab yourself a modem and relive the thrill of text-only browsing with Lynx. They're up to 2.8.7 now!
http://lynx.isc.org/
The firewall is so locked-down at work that sometimes my browsing really is text-only. That's as far back as I'm actually willing to go.
9600 baud forced people to be concise.
cccCCCCkkkkcchhhhkkkkkkkkeeeeeeeeekkkkkkkkbbeeeeeeepppppppeeeeeeppppp……
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/qqnUl.jpg" alt="" title="Hosted by imgur.com" />
Without a shred of irony or sarcasm, I really do miss my MUD, Northern Crossroads. Like the community we have here, everyone was really interesting and friendly (except there were no horrible blowhards who droned on about VWs or the perils of tenure). I even married one of my fellow players within the game *insert obvious joke here* Whatever ya'll might think, it wasn't until later I found out she was a complete hottie with a fantastic Kentucky accent, but that's a whole other story…Anyway, the MUD was a great escape from the rigours of an arts degree and a seven-night a week university drinking schedule.
I don't care if you've done it before, I'm still not marrying you.
Your reverse psychology will not work on me.
I, too, have fond memories of the MUD I played. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who got MUD-married back in those days, either. I suspect that mine wasn't a Kentucky hottie, though.
I just remember the invention of the WWW. I was 12, and I had access to BBS and Prodigy at the time. There was a small debate in the household as to whether we even thought Prodigy should bother building a gateway to the internet. Three years later, I remember looking back and laughing at that discussion. The one thing I really miss from that era is Mad Maze. There's a terrible javascript version out there that seems to work only on a specific point release of IE5, and it teases me (I used to play it as a kid, but I wasn't allowed to do a lot because it cost money).
Occasionally I think I miss Legend of the Red Dragon, then I go find an SSH/telnet BBS and play for a bit. I beat up a bunch of rats with a stick, nearly get killed by another rat, then get ripped off by the Inn Keeper and get killed anyway by a high level player overnight and lose most of my junk. At which point I ask myself "Why am I wasting my time?" In other words, it's a lot like Diablo and WoW, just without any graphics what-so-ever.
Prodigy was my gateway drug to the online world too. They deserve a fair amount of credit for being a lot more user-friendly than a lot of what else was out there in the pre-Windows world (I remember upgrading to DOS 6 and that it was a big deal). My wife actually has met F2F and keeps up with someone she first met thru Prodigy in around 1990.
There was some point when Prodigy changed its pricing structure and the more computer savvy and BBS/Usenet addicted of us migrated to a series of other services. The one I remember best was GEnie. It felt very "techie" compared to the consumer oriented Prodigy. But it worked best as a text based service and really flubbed the transition to the Web.
I do sorta miss Usenet as something useful, before spam and porn killed it.
Prodigy got some flak during its heyday for censoring e-mails.
My first exposure to the net was a Compuserve trial on my Mac some time in 1993. However, I discovered that they charged premiums for the good stuff so I switched to AOL for about six months. After that, it was early versions of Netscape and true exposure to the Web.