Internet nostalgia

I’ve been “on the Internet” (a term which, by the way, makes no sense) for about twelve or thirteen years now, and although this makes me a young ‘un from the perspective of those folks who invented TCP/IP, I still remember enough of the days before the World Wide Web to have some nostalgia for the way the Internet used to be. I bring this up because I just came across a little notebook in which I used to write down relevant URIs and other ephemera. Some of the gems in there:

• a listing of my favourite Archie servers
• directions for accessing the e-mail anonymizer that used to live at [email protected]
• my old FidoNet e-mail address ([email protected])
• logon information for my various FreeNet accounts such as the now-defunct Cleveland FreeNet
• a listing of Gopher servers upon which one would have found current price quotes for Macintoshes
• various sundry BBS telephone numbers that I’m sure are all out of service by now
• information on how to get to my Dad’s VAX account via Datapac (anyone know if Bell Canada is still operating Datapac these days?)

I was surprised to not only find that I’d written down information for accessing the Internet Oracle (a/k/a rec.humour.oracle) but that the Oracle is still going strong.

Anyone else have old Internet memories they’d like to contribute?