Remember When? A Historical Perspective of the Internet

[blitzen]

I Remember ...

- When there was no Internet, just ARPANET.

- Impressing the boss by drawing graphics with characters on the screen.
(\_/)
(^_^)
(___)O

- Walking outside at night after being on a green-white screen and seeing pink snow (The green rods in my eyes were burned out. They eventually came back).

- "Hacking" meant chopping up the wood for the winter.

- When you could launch a website from your garage on a 356 computer.

- When there was no PPC and spamming search engines worked.

- When Webcrawler was popular and DMOZ worked.

- 8086

What to you remember?

[bmiller011]

-Receiving AOL CDs weekly in the mail

- Merging two 56k modems to get 112k connection and thinking I had high speed

[martink]

Don't laugh... being now that I'm a Web Manager I obviously caught the vision, but I DO remember once upon a time thinking, "Why would I use that Internet-thing to look up information; I have a perfectly good set of encyclopedias on my bookshelf."

[a53mp]

on a side note, my 5 year old found an old landline telephone in a box, and didn't know what it was

[DigiDog]

The net before there was any WWW - and in 1992 using text based (Archie or Gopher) searches to
find anything so you could download it in slow motion over dial-up. Oh, it was a wonderful new world.

[carol]

- We programed in FORTRAN.

- There was this really cool text-based game called Adventure that we played surreptiously after work hours (seriously): "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike"

[chrisJumbo]

I wrote a game in Basic in the 80s (in high school). It was primarily text based but we also had a guy that new Pascal. He did the "graphics" portion in that. My favorite part was when you started the game a random number was generated and converted into a time in the game. When you hit that time, you were attacked by a werewolf. The only way to defeat it was from a room like on the 3rd level. If you hadn't gotten there you were dead.

My wife and I's theme song for our wedding was by Air Supply. Windows 3.1. Ohh! the glory days.

I would go further back, but don't want to date myself too much. :O)
cd :O)

[claybutler]

I was late in the game only getting my first computer in 1998. It was a monster workstation running NT4 with 384mb ram, a 9gb SCSI Ultra-Wide hard drive, a Pentium II 450 proccessor, a SCSI CD Rom drive, am Iomega Zip drive and a 19in Hitachi Superscan Elite Monitor - Cost $4,500. My friends chuckled when I later upgraded to 768mb. What would I do with so much ram!

I remember not knowing what CNTR+ALT+DEL meant. After 20 minutes of trying to figure it out (CNTR key, plus sign, ALT key, plus sign, etc) I called my friend who was a programmer at UC Berkeley. He explained it to me and then I was able to log on to a computer for the first time in my life. Seriously, I didn't know anything. Other than tinkering on the web at the library I had never used one.

I remember getting my first blue screen of death and calling my friend on what I should do.

"Just hit the reset button".

"You can do that?"

"Sure, it's not broken"

I remember taking my PC in for an upgrade and carefully packing it in my car with towels and blankets and driving like I was carrying and atomic bomb. I get to the shop and I carefully place it on the counter. A burly guy grabs it by one hand, flips it over and plops it on the work table.

"You can do that?"

"Yes, there's no up or down on a computer. You won't break it."

I remember my neighbors being impressed that I had DSL as well as the six months of torture on a 56k modem until it became available in my area.

I remember trying to figure out why my website wasn't doing better on Alta Vista and Hotbot.

I remember when steaming your video content cost big bucks and it still looked like crap.

I remember getting no spam.
Clicking on my first spam.
Getting my first spam email virus.

[stevealmond]

Thinking that I had joined the gods by having a sinclair ZX80 powered by a Z80 processor with 1KB RAM and 4KB ROM!! The machine was hooked up to my dad's state of the art colour tv that he had just bought when 90% of programmes were broadcast in black and white!

Upgrading to a ZX Spectrum and then the almighty Amstrad!

Learning a bit of BASIC at school!

Thinking Windows 3.1 was the bee's knees!

Using Intranet at work in the mid eighties, sending a note from my office in Birmingham to a colleague in London and amazed that he had it within fifteen minutes.

Being amazed at the speed of Ethernet and SNA architecture again in the early / mid eighties.

I could go on and on and on, but I've probably said too much and given my age away!!

[claybutler]

I could go on and on and on, but I've probably said too much and given my age away!!

Or you just started really, really, really, early

I had friends who were programming these lame little games in junior high (78' -80'). They were convinced that computers would take over the world. I thought they were dreaming. Called that one wrong.