[HN Gopher] What the internet looked like in 1994
___________________________________________________________________
What the internet looked like in 1994
Author : skilled
Score : 26 points
Date : 2024-07-07 18:32 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fastcompany.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fastcompany.com)
| retrac wrote:
| I find it misleading how so many of these articles talk about
| dial-up Internet at home, as if it was typically a person's first
| exposure to the Internet. For most people in the 90s, their first
| exposure to the Internet was on a public or company computer. The
| heat from a couple dozen CRT displays packed into a slightly too
| small room, was an integral part of the experience. As was
| "Downloading... (134 B/s)" while a couple dozen instances of
| Netscape all tried to cram their request packets over the 128
| kbit/s ISDN line that served the whole campus.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| > as if it was typically a person's first exposure to the
| Internet
|
| Because for many, it actually was.
| thejazzman wrote:
| Looks like someone didn't get their free 1000 hours of AOL.
| Maybe that's why I got so many.
| ben_w wrote:
| Of the hundred(?) or so AOL CDs that my parents and I got,
| only one came with a freephone (0800) number; the others
| were local-rate (0845) numbers that made it the same cost
| as all the other dialup ISPs.
| adamomada wrote:
| It really was though. A lot of people with computers got their
| first modem to dial into BBS systems or the compuserve type
| systems. Small ISPs got started up and you usually found out
| about them through BBSes as well because they didn't really
| have ad budgets and it was so niche.
|
| A friend of mine and I split the cost of a 1200 baud modem for
| the c64 and took turns with it.
|
| This was magic back then: 80 column terminal on a c64:
| http://kobolt.website/infocenter/images/novaterm-top.jpg
| mgarfias wrote:
| web != internet, especially in 1994. Bad headline is bad. news at
| 11.
| l1k wrote:
| Some of the sites that went online around 1994 are still there:
|
| https://north.pole.org/
|
| https://town.hall.org/
|
| I believe Carl Malamud (Internet Multicasting Service) was behind
| these.
|
| The audio files are in Sun Audio format, which all browsers
| supported natively back then. Chromium apparently no longer does,
| requires saving and opening in VLC.
| DamonHD wrote:
| One of my pages from around then still just about lives:
|
| http://www.exnet.com/springboard.html
| drewcoo wrote:
| That was the web. Most of my view of the Internet in 1994 was not
| web-based. I used more Gopher, NNTP, and Archie-searching for
| stuff to FTP-download.
|
| I'd dial into my university and an amazing amount of text was
| available to me. If I could find it. And nobody else needed to
| use the phone.
| pjmlp wrote:
| In 1994, I was still using Gopher, and reading email and Usenet
| with Pine, on IBM X Windows terminals, connected into DG/UX, and
| several xterms.
| ylee wrote:
| For me at Columbia Gopher was almost completely gone, although
| the university's public terminals still used it for the
| intranet. I used pine for email only, preferring trn for
| netnews. (I would soon switch to Emacs VM for email and slrn
| for Usenet, both of which I still use today.) I used X Window
| terminals, but even there most use was the above via xterm.
| Netscape was horribly unreliable and slow whether via X or on
| PCs/Macs; the fact that we used it at all regardless shows how
| immediately and obviously compelling the web was.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Yahoo's URL in 1994 was `http://akebono.stanford.edu/~yahoo/`.
| riddley wrote:
| I remember vividly the day "WWW" showed up in the university's
| Gopher menu. I asked my friend what it was all about and he said,
| "I looked at it; it sucked."
| alberth wrote:
| I miss the lack of bombardment of ads & popups.
|
| I'm looking at you FastCompany.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-07-07 23:02 UTC)