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
anon@anon.penet.fi - my old FidoNet e-mail address (
julian.dunn@f11.n241.z1.fidonet.org) - 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?
August 15, 1994.. That was the day my Interlog account became active (I can remember that date, but not my girlfriends birthdate :))
I remember doing things like..
finger user@host .. to see if they are online
"chatting" online using a website where you post to a form and the page reloads every few seconds to see other peoples posts.
NO MSN, ICQ, or AIM.. just IRC.
Backorifice. (Cult of the Dead Cow.. still around! http://www.cultdeadcow.com/).
I remember dialing up BBS's when I was quite young on my 286 laptop. The first sounds of the modem negotiating.. ahh. What I don't recall is where I got the numbers from … phonebook maybe? I remember trying quite a few.. the list was in the laptop which died some time ago.
Surfing 'porn' on a friends dial up connection from Interlog, oh, say in 1997. Fun. Alot of reading!