Internet Nostalgia

My good friend Dan Sloan recently posted a chart showing Internet adoption over time and asked when we first used the Internet. It was a great opportunity for me to recall my early days of programming. I wanted to share my reply here and am interested in your first experience with the Internet. When did you first "go online" and what was it like?

I was going online at the age of 13 by using a modem to dial into Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). You would dial, get a busy signal, and redial until a line was free, then read messages and post replies, then disconnect and do it all over. Software pirating was pretty much unchecked at the time and many BBS systems were designed to distribute "cracked" software that had copyright protection removed. Not all were that way.

In addition to online, we'd also share ideas and learn about new software and techniques through "computer swap meets." These were hosted events at convention halls and even churches and synagogues. You showed up with your computer system (for me, a Commodore 64 and a Cathode Ray Tube monitor), Tupper wares full of games and cartridges, and everyone would show off their systems and trade software. It wasn't unusual to see rows of stacked disk drives blinking and squawking as disks were copied over, or to see people huddled around someone's machine who had the latest cartridge for breaking into games and placing machine language instructions directly into the computer's memory using "machine monitors." The advanced people used assemblers and had the patience to wait 15 minutes as their program was compiled and loaded into memory after every change for testing.

The choices were mind-blowing back then. In the same row you could walk past a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, a RadioShack TRS-80 or COCO, an Atari, a Commodore PET, 64, or 128, an Apple II, IIe, or wistfully watch an Amiga demo leave the Apple IIGS owners speechless. I remember hating that the Commodore 128 booted in monochrome but being jealous of it having an 80-column mode instead of just 40 like the Commodore or worse, the 32 columns on the TI-99/4A. In addition to titles like Hunt the Wumpus, Tombstone, and Parsec from the earlier days, the voice synthesized narrations of Mission: Impossible competed with the mind-mending puzzles of text-based adventure games like Zork. I remember when Pawn of Prophecy was released with its rich graphics overlays, or Legacy of the Ancients that took the Ultima-styled fun of a 2D map-based adventure game and enhanced it with arcade-style challenges.

I started using the actual Internet in 1993. I discovered a hookup on our campus at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. I quickly discovered Internet Relay Chat and was speaking in real-time to people around the world from my underground terminal near the Black Hills or over a dial-up modem connection from my dorm room.

When the system administrator informed me that the machines were for research only and that I could have my account disabled if I continued "chatting," I simply downloaded the IRC source code for the client and recompiled it with the name "Archie" which was basically a search engine for software projects. I'd chat all night, but the sys admin just saw someone doing hardcore research over Archie. I spent my entire semester there learning to code in C++, finding my way around Unix machines and permissions and discovering new sites like the University of Michigan's weather server that would (gasp) give me the weather in my hometown of St. Petersburg, Florida from my snowed-in dorm room in Rapid City. Unfortunately, it turns out the college wasn't grading me based on all-night Internet sessions and frowned upon students who never showed up to class. But I digress.

Some fun facts for readers unfamiliar with the early days of going online:

Imagine a Twitter that only allows you to have one tweet available at any time. That's essentially how we tweeted in the early 1990s, only the client was called "Finger" so you'd type "finger <person@address>" to get their update. When Doom and later Quake were released (both first person shooter or FPS games that completely transformed the gaming industry), we were able to keep up with the developers like John Carmack and John Romero through their status updates.

Multi-user games were popular because you could play but also chat. People enjoyed "virtual cosplay" by creating characters and finding weapons and artifacts, then would hang out in these Multi-user Dungeons or MUDs and chat. You used Telnet to connect to MUDs which is still surprisingly common and popular today. Many marriages started out by couples who met in MUD.

There actually was a tool to browse resources on remote machines using a user interface instead of using the file transfer protocol (FTP) text-based console. It was called "Gopher" and would display directory structures and document links so you could remotely browse to find various assets.

Meanwhile most web browsing was done with Lynx (still available today), a text-based web client. Although Mosaic and Navigator were released (the first graphical web browsers) and becoming popular, few people accessed the Internet from their personal machines. Instead, they used terminals which were text-based and therefore required text-based solutions. JavaScript was there but discouraged, and it would be years before it was considered acceptable to have a site that only worked with JavaScript enabled. JavaScript programs at the time were 20% making sure JavaScript was supported, 10% figuring out what versions of ActiveX or Flash were available, 60% detecting the web browser and using alternate pieces of code to handle completely different properties, objects, and APIs to do the same thing across different browsers, and 10% actual functionality that did something interesting.

Speaking of Internet access, at that time the Internet was unstable and would often have nodes "break away" requiring new routes to get established. We constantly debated whether it would last or get replaced by something else. Services like the Microsoft Network (MSN) and America Online (AOL) along with CompuServ, Prodigy, and others were competing to be "the" way to connect and hosted their own private network infrastructure and protocols that you could only access through paid clients.

It was the classic open source "free" vs. commercial, proprietary, paid competition, and open/free won. I still remember businesses would more often include their AOL "search term" in ads than an Internet-based web address or email.

To get connected from home took some effort. If you were lucky enough to find a provider like Netcom and have the right hardware to dial in at miserably slow speeds, Windows did not yet embrace the Internet and actually required you to install extra software to implement the "TCP/IP stack." It required this software plus a subscription to get online.

Downloading files wasn't as easy as clicking and waiting. You actually had to decide what protocol you wanted to use and pick between names like Kermit and Z-modem. Not all servers supported all choices. Most protocols made you start over if you lost a connection, which was painful given that a typical download could take hours. Some protocols supported compression and resuming a disconnected session.

Windows at the time was so sluggish at running the TCP/IP stack that many of us would dual-boot to Linux and use the Linux boot for Internet access. After all, TCP/IP was built-in and it could dial into your provider as part of startup. The only con was that we didn't have fancy installers. To run Linux, you would first do a configuration pass and specify exactly what you wanted in your operating system. You also had to provide refresh rates and timings for your monitor. This was low-level information and getting it wrong didn't just mean your display wouldn't work - bad values had the potential to actually burn out your monitor!

You then built the version of Linux you just configured and then booted into it praying your monitor wouldn't die and you included the right dependencies to get online. If you left out an important part of the stack, you basically went back and started all over.

Ah but what fun we had.

When were you first online and what memories do you have to share?