[HN Gopher] An early social un-network
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An early social un-network
Author : dcminter
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-02-17 09:56 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (paperstack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (paperstack.com)
| cbm-vic-20 wrote:
| I was at university just as residential networking was installed,
| so all of the students doing computer work would hang out in the
| room full of terminals and workstations. There was a single
| serial terminal on each residential floor for quick email
| sessions, but if you needed to get work done, you went over to
| the computer center. Some rooms had X Terminals, others more
| powerful workstations, and there were some large central hosts
| that had the licensed applications needed for some coursework.
| There would be a hundred people logged in at once. It was common
| for people to set up .plan files, use Unix "talk" to message each
| other, we had a local Usenet hierarchy in addition to the global
| one. People shared what they learned, experimented with early
| Gopher and Web, a natural community was formed.
|
| Once the residences were wired, a lot of that culture went away.
| lubujackson wrote:
| I love hearing about these early forays in social media. Having
| been involved on BBSes in my youth there was a certain magic
| that hasn't been reproduced since, especially around that sweet
| spot of local, pseudo-anonymous networks - kind of like seeing
| the same crowd in a coffeeshop.
|
| I read in college about the advent of city life in the 19th
| century where a new form of human interaction was explored, the
| "flaneur": someone a part of the urban crowd, but anonymous
| within it. Able to view on people's daily lives, but without
| being seen themselves. Wild to think that this was a new
| concept to people that had only know village/town living for
| generations. I feel early computer networks created something
| similar online, albeit briefly.
| lurk2 wrote:
| There have been a few networks that have tried to emulate
| what you're describing with regards to local pseudonymity
| (NextDoor being the first that comes to mind), but most of
| the audience for it just uses a local subreddit or Facebook
| group now. WhatsApp can also be an option, depending on the
| country you are in.
| weinzierl wrote:
| This old terminal hardware is just beautiful. Terribly
| unergonomic probably, but certainly nice to look at.
| kitd wrote:
| _Liverpool 1 West Ham United 2_
|
| I see you ...
| tombert wrote:
| I definitely like the aesthetic of it. It has a kind of neat
| "hacker" look to it, like simultaneously "high tech" but also
| kind of "scrapped together"?
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I'm really glad those of us who were around on these systems in
| the late 80s/early-90s are recording some of their experiences.
| It really was a wonderful period, when the Internet was small,
| and to some extent we felt like we were already living in the
| future. I find it hard to explain... but the character of the
| connected world was different in those days. The technical
| barriers were a great filter.
| flir wrote:
| I know I was reading think pieces by the mid-90s that accused
| these early adopters of being unreasonable elitists, who were
| gatekeeping because they just happened to get there first, and
| should shut up and sit down instead of complaining about their
| clubhouse having all these new faces in it.
|
| I'm gonna say it.
|
| It _was_ better before them.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Of course there are a million things you can do and find and
| learn now, that you couldn't in the early 90s, and I'm glad
| for that part. The overall quality of the discourse today
| though... not so much.
| lurk2 wrote:
| One of the things I've noticed in the last several years is
| that I seem to have more interactions online that leave me
| without any doubt in my mind that the other party is
| experiencing some manner of psychosis. You'd _occasionally_
| run into people like this on YouTube in the late-2000s and on
| Reddit in the early-2010s, but it had a certain novelty to it
| back then. Everyone had a story about into an argument with
| some crazy guy online. In the last couple of years, I 'd say
| I see someone experiencing some sort of psychological crisis
| online more days than not. This hasn't had the kind of
| negative impact that SEO had on the Internet, but it
| certainly hasn't helped.
| flir wrote:
| Mike Corley is a name some ancient Brits might remember. I
| just checked and his website's gone. I hope he's ok.
| dugmartin wrote:
| Yes, I (a student at the time at a midwest USA university)
| remember being on a BITNET relay chat in the fall of 1989
| chatting with a German university student _while_ the Berlin
| Wall was falling down. To me that was magical - it was like
| having a teleporter and being "virtually" there instead of
| just watching the news on TV.
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| After some short FIDO BBS tries I eventually settled on MAUSnet
| with posh Zyxel (19200baud, you 14k4 losers :)) and later Bitnet
| Relay and UUCP. IRC was "The New kid on the block" and crowded
| with beginners...
| dhosek wrote:
| VMS did, in fact have finger back in those days, although it
| might have not been a stock utility. In Claremont, we had the
| advantage of having Ned Freed (inventor of MIME) on the computing
| staff at HMC, so we might have had a lot of innovative stuff that
| wasn't yet universal. JANET did have a gateway to the rest of the
| world. On interesting thing is that JANET addresses were the
| inverse of contemporary domain naming, with the highest level
| part of the domain name appearing first (kind of appropriate for
| an island where they drive on the "wrong" side of the road).
| There was also a tendency to use really short names, so a
| friend/colleague at Imperial College was something like mc @
| uk.ac.ic (which was always fun to say out loud).
|
| Most of Europe was on a network (EARN) based on the IBM protocols
| that undergirded BITNET. Switzerland, Austria and Germany
| followed a stereotypically teutonic and highly rational system of
| assigning domain names where the first letter indicated the
| country (D=Germany, A=Austria, C=Switzerland), the next two
| letters were the region, then two letters for the institution and
| the last three characters identified the individual machine which
| was making the best of the situation where there were only eight
| characters available to identify each machine on the whole
| network with a flat namespace.
|
| BITNET names were a bit more freewheeling, but often were going
| to be something like institute+machine type, so UICVM for the IBM
| mainframe at UIC, HMCVAX for the VAX at Harvey Mudd College, etc.
| There was a Bitnet protocol for real-time chat.
|
| Most Unix machines eschewed the Bitnet protocols for UUCP which,
| at least initially, often required explicit hops from one machine
| to the next, so you might have to address an email to something
| like drofnats!caltech!jarthur!dhosek to get an email from
| Stanford to Harvey Mudd, although by the late 80s, only the most
| obscure corners of the Unix world required a path with an
| explicit path.
|
| The first generation of the internet did a lot to hide the
| disparate networking protocols underlying ARPA vs BITNET vs JANET
| vs UUCP, etc. (EARN and BITNET, using the same protocol
| effectively acted as a single network at that time), which meant
| that it was no longer necessary to do things like include
| gateways in email addresses (WISCVM was one machine that I recall
| being on both ARPA and BITNET and was a common path to route
| email between the networks). If you look at old issues of
| _TUGBoat_ from the 80s, you'll often see lists of email paths
| authors would provide to make it easier to reach them including
| some communication protocols which are long gone like Telex.
| js2 wrote:
| > No really, we had this. On the Vax it was DEC$PHONE and allowed
| up to four (or was it five?) simultaneous participants in a real-
| time text chat channel. If you "phoned" someone using their
| account name on the system then a "ringing" text alert would
| appear in the middle of whatever else they were doing on their
| terminal. Awfully like getting @here alerts in Slack in the
| modern era.
|
| Seems like an oversight not mentioning IRC in this section.
|
| > Like DEC$PHONE you had talk I believe? Instant messenger but
| far more network friendly and so closer to what we think of
| today.
|
| We also had (still have...) Zephyr:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)
|
| That's what we used primarily in the CS dept at my university in
| the early 90s and the tech staff were still using it at my first
| job in the late 90s.
| dan_m2k wrote:
| A really good read. I was a bit later to the party but, my God,
| it was better then.
|
| But the reality of shareholder value and developers salaries had
| to come from somewhere, and here we are, the enshittification of
| the internet is upon us and you can't even load a HTML document
| without being tracked, spammed and generally frustrated.
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