I Love the 90s
January 9, 2017 8:28 AM Subscribe
Anne Helen Peterson on going to college after the internet became a thing, but before it became *a thing*. Part of 1999 Week at Buzzfeed.
Previously: 1996 Week at the A/V Club.
Previously: 1996 Week at the A/V Club.
Bah, by 1999 the internet had jumped the shark. PINE or bust!
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:51 AM on January 9, 2017 [25 favorites]
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:51 AM on January 9, 2017 [25 favorites]
PINE is not Elm!
posted by tractorfeed at 8:52 AM on January 9, 2017 [14 favorites]
posted by tractorfeed at 8:52 AM on January 9, 2017 [14 favorites]
I was in college at the same time and this captures the feeling very well. Except at our school, websites didn't load slowly on dorm ethernet -- they loaded INCREDIBLY fast. I was shocked and overjoyed the first time I downloaded Netscape and it only took like 30 seconds instead of half an hour like on dialup. The network admins at our school did an admirable job -- things never got bogged down with all of the sharing of MP3s over windows file sharing, and they never blocked ports so I ran an MP3 ftp site that was open to the whole internet and got quite a lot of traffic. Makes me wonder if they were aware of it or there was tacit approval of all this fun, cool stuff going on. And then there was the time that my friend called me on my dorm room phone and told me about this cool thing he found called Napster.
posted by zsazsa at 8:55 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
posted by zsazsa at 8:55 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
I was offered a pine account when I started college in '93. I turned it down, thinking, why would I want that?
posted by medeine at 8:56 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by medeine at 8:56 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Finger! There's something I hadn't thought of in years. I'm older than her, but there's some resonance with my own subgroup -- people who lived much of their lives on and around the internet, in a world where that wasn't yet the normal thing for our age group.
posted by tavella at 8:59 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by tavella at 8:59 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
It seems very, very hard to remember that era now; When it was absurdist Space-Jam-We-Have-No-Idea-How-To-Do-This-Corporate fumbling, unrestricted sharing of stuff, and Wild-West-No-Sheriff-In-Town expansionism.
Now, off to work™, largely in an entirely closed ecosystem of applications, in a world where corporate speech is 'free, and protected.'
posted by mrdaneri at 9:00 AM on January 9, 2017 [10 favorites]
Now, off to work™, largely in an entirely closed ecosystem of applications, in a world where corporate speech is 'free, and protected.'
posted by mrdaneri at 9:00 AM on January 9, 2017 [10 favorites]
When I started college there was no network and you had to pay to get a phone line installed. By the end I was playing Tribes against people from Brazil.
One of the biggest roadblocks for me was that Windows back then (98SE) was TERRIBLE. I ended up learning everything I know about Linux because I just couldn't get the network running properly otherwise.
posted by selfnoise at 9:01 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
One of the biggest roadblocks for me was that Windows back then (98SE) was TERRIBLE. I ended up learning everything I know about Linux because I just couldn't get the network running properly otherwise.
posted by selfnoise at 9:01 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I'm going to be an old grump and admit I have trouble accepting a time period starting in 1999 as the "infancy" of the internet. But, then some of the text based experiences echo back to what it was like a decade earlier. Except, that was early enough that many students didn't ever bother with their e-mail address - it was assigned by the school and largely forgotten. I think this is more of the awkward adolescence, when the making friendships with everyone, while fitting in by being different, was the priority.
But, I think the observations about how the always connected social media has shifted things is pretty spot on. Except, she skims over how commercialization has also shifted the experience. In some ways it was easier to find the information (in certain domains) you really wanted twenty years ago than it is today.
posted by meinvt at 9:02 AM on January 9, 2017 [13 favorites]
But, I think the observations about how the always connected social media has shifted things is pretty spot on. Except, she skims over how commercialization has also shifted the experience. In some ways it was easier to find the information (in certain domains) you really wanted twenty years ago than it is today.
posted by meinvt at 9:02 AM on January 9, 2017 [13 favorites]
This is pretty neat, thanks for posting.
I was in eighth grade in 1999. I think a lot about how lucky my cohort was to have the internet be an aspect of our lives before social media was such a dominating presence. We had AOL instant messenger, we had email addresses, we could use the internet for research and communication, but we didn't live online. And I spent way more time on the internet than most of my peers!
I remember when my university got The Facebook in 2004, a friend from Yale was visiting and signed me and my housemates up immediately. It's still kind of mindboggling to think how quickly Everything Changed.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:04 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
I was in eighth grade in 1999. I think a lot about how lucky my cohort was to have the internet be an aspect of our lives before social media was such a dominating presence. We had AOL instant messenger, we had email addresses, we could use the internet for research and communication, but we didn't live online. And I spent way more time on the internet than most of my peers!
I remember when my university got The Facebook in 2004, a friend from Yale was visiting and signed me and my housemates up immediately. It's still kind of mindboggling to think how quickly Everything Changed.
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:04 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
“What's your ICQ number?”
posted by Fizz at 9:07 AM on January 9, 2017 [40 favorites]
posted by Fizz at 9:07 AM on January 9, 2017 [40 favorites]
Also: last year's Web Safe 2k16 project explores this sort of pre-broadband internet nostalgia in a really fun, unique way. I was part of it, I'm sure some other mefites were as well!
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:10 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by everybody had matching towels at 9:10 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
[this comment is under construction]
posted by entropicamericana at 9:12 AM on January 9, 2017 [16 favorites]
posted by entropicamericana at 9:12 AM on January 9, 2017 [16 favorites]
I got to college in '98, and had so many similar experiences. I have a lot of thoughts, but for the time being: Oh, John Carmack and his .plan .
posted by tocts at 9:15 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by tocts at 9:15 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I graduated in 1991, * but still followed my alma mater's student newspaper in 1999. I remember there was some new-fangled online student system, can't remember the name of the program, where you could...do stuff. It was quite a useful thing, actually. You could connect online and put all your class schedules in one place, actually check the cafeteria menu, see when the gym was free...and then it abruptly shut down after only 4 months. Everyone was in shock, the paper's headline was huge and bewildered, "[PROGRAM] SHUTS DOWN AFTER ONLY 4 MONTHS!! ARGH!" I remember thinking well, duh, of course it shut down, because this is 1999 and the exact time when everyone was creating software products without figuring out how to make money, otherwise known as the internet bubble, and the reason for the existence of places like fuckedcompany.com.
My roommate had an Amiga, and we could actually dial in to the university VAX system to check our school-only emails without having to leave the room. We were awesome.
posted by Melismata at 9:17 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
My roommate had an Amiga, and we could actually dial in to the university VAX system to check our school-only emails without having to leave the room. We were awesome.
posted by Melismata at 9:17 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
It may be apropos to mention the late, great suck.com which, to me, captured the zeitgeist of that era.
posted by mrdaneri at 9:19 AM on January 9, 2017 [10 favorites]
posted by mrdaneri at 9:19 AM on January 9, 2017 [10 favorites]
I was offered a pine account when I started college in '93. I turned it down, thinking, why would I want that?
That's nothing. When I was in college:
* Somebody showed me how to play mp3 files and I thought "who would want to play music on their computer?"
* I saw a Humvee driving itself around a parking lot and thought "who would want a car that can drive itself?"
* Was told a building on campus could survive an impact from a 747 and thought "who would would purposely fly a plane into a building?"
posted by peeedro at 9:19 AM on January 9, 2017 [16 favorites]
That's nothing. When I was in college:
* Somebody showed me how to play mp3 files and I thought "who would want to play music on their computer?"
* I saw a Humvee driving itself around a parking lot and thought "who would want a car that can drive itself?"
* Was told a building on campus could survive an impact from a 747 and thought "who would would purposely fly a plane into a building?"
posted by peeedro at 9:19 AM on January 9, 2017 [16 favorites]
Heh, "a modicum of willpower" becomes harder and harder to summon.
posted by limeonaire at 9:22 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by limeonaire at 9:22 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah, 1999 was when I was graduating from college and looking for web design jobs.
This was after four years of spending all my spare time in the various computer labs around the campus. The tiny all-night usually empty lab with black-and-white monitors that let you telnet directly into your studentweb account, so you could create webpages no matter how late it was. The larger lab that included a colour (!) printer, so I could print out Sailor Moon pictures. The lab I helped make at the women's center on campus, where we had the latest Macintoshes (with zip drives!), so that the women's studies' students could get online, where I had Photoshop and Netscape and IRC and spent all my time exploring the world.
I didn't own my own computer until 1999. College wasn't just a place for me to learn about ancient history and media theory - it was the place where this crazy place could be accessed. Even when I moved off-campus, I still walked in to get Internet access. I still needed PINE and IRC and Netscape and SimpleText. I still needed to build my webpages and talk to my friends and explore everything out there.
It was strange and beautiful and I'm so glad I was a part of it.
posted by Katemonkey at 9:29 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
This was after four years of spending all my spare time in the various computer labs around the campus. The tiny all-night usually empty lab with black-and-white monitors that let you telnet directly into your studentweb account, so you could create webpages no matter how late it was. The larger lab that included a colour (!) printer, so I could print out Sailor Moon pictures. The lab I helped make at the women's center on campus, where we had the latest Macintoshes (with zip drives!), so that the women's studies' students could get online, where I had Photoshop and Netscape and IRC and spent all my time exploring the world.
I didn't own my own computer until 1999. College wasn't just a place for me to learn about ancient history and media theory - it was the place where this crazy place could be accessed. Even when I moved off-campus, I still walked in to get Internet access. I still needed PINE and IRC and Netscape and SimpleText. I still needed to build my webpages and talk to my friends and explore everything out there.
It was strange and beautiful and I'm so glad I was a part of it.
posted by Katemonkey at 9:29 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
In some ways it was easier to find the information (in certain domains) you really wanted twenty years ago than it is today.
This is so true, and it's my biggest lament and source of nostalgia. I remember fondly the days when the reaction to a search engine turning up 500 hits was "Wow, everybody's talking about this!" and not "Wow, nobody's talking about this!" That lovely little sweet spot where information and opinions felt freely accessible to (almost) everyone yet we weren't drowning in an unfilterable mire of nonsense.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:31 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
This is so true, and it's my biggest lament and source of nostalgia. I remember fondly the days when the reaction to a search engine turning up 500 hits was "Wow, everybody's talking about this!" and not "Wow, nobody's talking about this!" That lovely little sweet spot where information and opinions felt freely accessible to (almost) everyone yet we weren't drowning in an unfilterable mire of nonsense.
posted by tobascodagama at 9:31 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
I have no idea how these people got their cats wedged into their scanners, or why.
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:32 AM on January 9, 2017 [9 favorites]
posted by Ufez Jones at 9:32 AM on January 9, 2017 [9 favorites]
I went to college in 2002. My experience with the internet from the 90s:
- I vividly remember the first time I ever witnessed an email being sent. (In my fourth grade G&T class where we had a technology day, and the school computer teacher demonstrated sending an email to someone via the local university's Telnet)
- The first internet access I had, at age 11, was through CompuServ. At age 13 I finally got my parents to switch over to AOL for two reasons: one, that my best friend was on AOL and emails between us took two days (TWO DAYS) to go through the different services, and two, that I was running up massive bills on CS because those were tied to time spent online, whereas AOL had unlimited time for your $20/mo. (We also ended up with a second phone line by the time I was 15, due to me tying it up all the time)
- I remember when my bff mentioned "this cool way to get music" someone had told her about called Napster. Each song took about 30 minutes to download, on a good day, over our dialup. I could of course only do this overnight when no one else wanted the phone.
- AIM profiles and away messages definitely trained me to brand myself appropriately on FB.
- My high school was a fancy one and did its best to be techy so we had PINE for school-based email that no one ever used. My high school also had to host their website on a local university's server, so we were myhighschool.university.edu.
- Going to college and having access to broadband was amazing. AMAZING. But crippling when we went home for holidays, because most people still only had dialup at home then, and god forbid your college network password expire over Christmas break because then you'd have to VPN in over dialup to reset it and that, if it worked at all, could take an hour.
I'm pretty glad I finished college with a minimum of FB... my college wasn't even added to FB until my senior year, and even though some of us managed accounts before that due to having email addresses for other universities, adding photos wasn't so much a thing (and cameraphones weren't so much a thing, so uploading digital photos from cameras took, like, effort). I think it reduced a lot of stress.
posted by olinerd at 9:35 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
- I vividly remember the first time I ever witnessed an email being sent. (In my fourth grade G&T class where we had a technology day, and the school computer teacher demonstrated sending an email to someone via the local university's Telnet)
- The first internet access I had, at age 11, was through CompuServ. At age 13 I finally got my parents to switch over to AOL for two reasons: one, that my best friend was on AOL and emails between us took two days (TWO DAYS) to go through the different services, and two, that I was running up massive bills on CS because those were tied to time spent online, whereas AOL had unlimited time for your $20/mo. (We also ended up with a second phone line by the time I was 15, due to me tying it up all the time)
- I remember when my bff mentioned "this cool way to get music" someone had told her about called Napster. Each song took about 30 minutes to download, on a good day, over our dialup. I could of course only do this overnight when no one else wanted the phone.
- AIM profiles and away messages definitely trained me to brand myself appropriately on FB.
- My high school was a fancy one and did its best to be techy so we had PINE for school-based email that no one ever used. My high school also had to host their website on a local university's server, so we were myhighschool.university.edu.
- Going to college and having access to broadband was amazing. AMAZING. But crippling when we went home for holidays, because most people still only had dialup at home then, and god forbid your college network password expire over Christmas break because then you'd have to VPN in over dialup to reset it and that, if it worked at all, could take an hour.
I'm pretty glad I finished college with a minimum of FB... my college wasn't even added to FB until my senior year, and even though some of us managed accounts before that due to having email addresses for other universities, adding photos wasn't so much a thing (and cameraphones weren't so much a thing, so uploading digital photos from cameras took, like, effort). I think it reduced a lot of stress.
posted by olinerd at 9:35 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
For a slightly earlier view (late 1980s/early 90s), check out Operating System as Social Network.
posted by fings at 9:37 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by fings at 9:37 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
Ah, for the days of arguing about wasting bandwidth instead of politics and pumpkin spice... -- .-_|\ / \ Perth ->*.--._/ vposted by mubba at 9:37 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
I started college in 1997, so this is right up my alley. I still remember logging onto my college's brand new website, which probably only eight people had seen at that point. Some jokester had changed all the instance of "Public" to "Pubic." The beginnings of 4chan at work, I suppose. I got a workstudy job, and my new supervisor asked me to send out an email to every student. I hadn't the slightest clue how to do such a thing, so we both sat down and figured it out together. It was a brave new world.
posted by backwards compatible at 9:38 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by backwards compatible at 9:38 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
Pretty great essay- I like how she both captures the feeling of the time, and addresses the trap of romanticizing a "simpler time".
posted by Secretariat at 9:38 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by Secretariat at 9:38 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
***DANK6789 is phoning you on telnet.metafilter.edu***
posted by dr_dank at 9:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by dr_dank at 9:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
Finger? Heh! That was just used just to know whether or not you should email or just fire up talk (or zypher for the sophisticated... zctl hide)
posted by Stu-Pendous at 9:46 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Stu-Pendous at 9:46 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I remember when my university got The Facebook in 2004, a friend from Yale was visiting and signed me and my housemates up immediately. It's still kind of mindboggling to think how quickly Everything Changed.
I remember overhearing two loathsome classmates complaining about when they started opening up Facebook to state schools, which is super weird (and still awful!) a decade later.
I started college three years after this and parts of it feel sort of familiar to my first year, and basically none of it feels like the post-Facebook experience; you're absolutely right about how quickly it changed.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:47 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I remember overhearing two loathsome classmates complaining about when they started opening up Facebook to state schools, which is super weird (and still awful!) a decade later.
I started college three years after this and parts of it feel sort of familiar to my first year, and basically none of it feels like the post-Facebook experience; you're absolutely right about how quickly it changed.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 9:47 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I graduated college in 1999. HotBot was the best search engine, though occasionally Dogpile or Infoseek would yield better results for a particular thing. The computer lab was filled with z29 (or was it VT100?) terminals, though there was a special computer lab for the computer science majors filled with Suns -- 99% of the activity in that lab was guys playing Netrek. My 386 laptop had a 2400 baud modem where you could read each line as things loaded because the scroll was so slow. My computer at home couldn't run Myst because the processor was too wimpy.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:47 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:47 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
Oh and occasionally you'd w a crush and they'd be w'ing you! Zing!
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:50 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:50 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I also played FurryMuck in that era, which I recently found out still exists. I emailed a wizard to see if my character still existed, but alas it did not.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:52 AM on January 9, 2017
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:52 AM on January 9, 2017
Wow....yeah I was in college from 98-02 so this hit pretty close to home. My friend and I were heavy on the techy spectrum and spent far too much time chatting logged on to the schools server via telnet...never bothered with 'talk' for some reason...we used to just use our email accounts via PINE to chat with rapid short messages.
posted by Captain_Science at 10:01 AM on January 9, 2017
posted by Captain_Science at 10:01 AM on January 9, 2017
I lived in the last residence at the University of Toronto to be wired for the Internet. My first year, we had to pay for an off-site dial-up connection even though we were on campus. I could never get anyone on staff to acknowledge that that ouroborus made no sense. My second year, the one guy who had a CD burner at the end of the hall got an early DSL connection and we ran ethernet cables up and down the halls. Finally, they wired our building. And we went wild. It was the dean's job to police usage overages, and she refused to for our building, know how long we went without. At one point a list of the top network usage on campus was published. It went something like 1) Physics workstation 2) Library terminal 3) guy down the hall from me 4) another library terminal 5) me. I'm curious how laughably small that bandwidth usage would be now. All we were downloading were low bitrate mp3's, Simpsons episodes in RealPlayer format, and VCD's if we were willing to let it download all night.
The changes that happened in my school years 98-02 were huge. And so many things I went through living in residence would be unthinkable now, from asking if we wanted on a smoking floor or not, to having a Bell rep at move-in day so you could get your room's phone jack turned on.
I walked through my old campus a few weeks ago and one little thing that stood out was the display case that held the week's dining hall menu was empty. When the menu is online, why bother printing one out?
posted by thecjm at 10:02 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
The changes that happened in my school years 98-02 were huge. And so many things I went through living in residence would be unthinkable now, from asking if we wanted on a smoking floor or not, to having a Bell rep at move-in day so you could get your room's phone jack turned on.
I walked through my old campus a few weeks ago and one little thing that stood out was the display case that held the week's dining hall menu was empty. When the menu is online, why bother printing one out?
posted by thecjm at 10:02 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
I remember when there were no ISPs and graduating from college was like getting your corner of the table sawed off and being kicked out into an unconnected world.
We went through all kinds of weird machinations back then to hang onto our .edu accounts so we could still dial in to the Internet from the post-campus world. It was bad...
posted by Naberius at 10:02 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
We went through all kinds of weird machinations back then to hang onto our .edu accounts so we could still dial in to the Internet from the post-campus world. It was bad...
posted by Naberius at 10:02 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
We had email when I was at Penn State but you had to be in the lab in the computer building to use it, so its utility was marginal.
posted by octothorpe at 10:07 AM on January 9, 2017
posted by octothorpe at 10:07 AM on January 9, 2017
I remember when posting a message used to cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Man, I sure wasted a lot of peoples' money posting gross stories on alt.tasteless.
posted by CaseyB at 10:08 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by CaseyB at 10:08 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
That was an acute nostalgia-pain, Naberius. I recall all sorts of administrative shenanigans trying to hold on to my *.edu accounts so I could leverage the baroque WINSOCK-56k-based dialup provision-- which actually beat my local-ISP's offerings hands down. Imagine such a thing.
posted by mrdaneri at 10:09 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by mrdaneri at 10:09 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
1999... the nascent years of the Internet! I remember that.
I remember that it was the beginning of the end for Netscape then. I remember downloading the first released version of the Gecko browser engine and playing around with it - it would fit on a 1.44 MB floppy. I would have been surprised if you'd told me I'd be using the great-great-grandchild of that engine to render the web in 2017.
I remember setting kids UP for the college experience of 1999. I spent a summer in 1996 or so installing ethernet in the dorms on campus - a cushy job, hard work but it paid really well (by college student summer job standards). I can still correctly place low-voltage wall outlets, or run and terminate cat5/6 cables, which has come in handy multiple times over the years.
I remember when the U gave us web space in 1995. Dicking around with code scribbled onto paper, by hand, painstakingly typing it up and carrying it on a disk to the computer lab to upload via FTP. The Internet of 1999, yeah, my stupid web page was part of that mess... it's still up today (but no longer hosted by my U, I had to start paying for the service on my own eventually).
I remember before graphical browsing, when you wanted to look at the Internet you needed the magical IP address of the BBS you were trying to hit. Remembering the combo of 4 groups of 3 digits seemed weird until it didn't. These days we don't generally have to think about addresses; it's weird to remember that underneath it all, the computers still refer to each other by the coded addresses instead of the human-friendly names.
Gopher? I think I might have gophered something. I can't recall what, or why, but it might have been at the library. Text-based electronic card catalogs though, those were neat; they were still new enough that the U had a huge cabinet full of actual paper cards available for the people who were too used to them to try looking through the computer for textbooks.
I remember the first email access, freshman year; the glowing green or amber text on the CRT, the first time we accidentally emailed the wrong person or realized belatedly that there was no way to UN-send a message that should have been left unsent. Dialing in on the "blazing fast" 14.4 baud modem on a shiny new Mac Classic - the groaning staticky squeal it made as it connected, the pain of not being able to make a phone call because your roommate was checking his mail.
But what I think resonates most with me, as far as Tales from 1999 goes, is that it was the year some guy named Matt built a website with a blue background where people could comment at will. I think I stumbled across it about a year later, while in grad school, and have been hanging around here ever since. I even eventually opened an account, after the Great Lock-Out was lifted. Funny how those things work, huh?
It's strange to look back on it all. It changed really fast. The internet that I had starting college in '92 was way different than it was for kids in '99, and it's just gotten more complicated since then. And it's funny to see people wax nostalgic about things like this, because my memories of the same things go deeper. I'm sure that other folks here would look at my college memories and laugh at my naive youthfulness, then put me in my place by regaling me with tales of the Elder Days when computer access meant knowing a guy with ability to connect to the campus mainframe...
posted by caution live frogs at 10:09 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
I remember that it was the beginning of the end for Netscape then. I remember downloading the first released version of the Gecko browser engine and playing around with it - it would fit on a 1.44 MB floppy. I would have been surprised if you'd told me I'd be using the great-great-grandchild of that engine to render the web in 2017.
I remember setting kids UP for the college experience of 1999. I spent a summer in 1996 or so installing ethernet in the dorms on campus - a cushy job, hard work but it paid really well (by college student summer job standards). I can still correctly place low-voltage wall outlets, or run and terminate cat5/6 cables, which has come in handy multiple times over the years.
I remember when the U gave us web space in 1995. Dicking around with code scribbled onto paper, by hand, painstakingly typing it up and carrying it on a disk to the computer lab to upload via FTP. The Internet of 1999, yeah, my stupid web page was part of that mess... it's still up today (but no longer hosted by my U, I had to start paying for the service on my own eventually).
I remember before graphical browsing, when you wanted to look at the Internet you needed the magical IP address of the BBS you were trying to hit. Remembering the combo of 4 groups of 3 digits seemed weird until it didn't. These days we don't generally have to think about addresses; it's weird to remember that underneath it all, the computers still refer to each other by the coded addresses instead of the human-friendly names.
Gopher? I think I might have gophered something. I can't recall what, or why, but it might have been at the library. Text-based electronic card catalogs though, those were neat; they were still new enough that the U had a huge cabinet full of actual paper cards available for the people who were too used to them to try looking through the computer for textbooks.
I remember the first email access, freshman year; the glowing green or amber text on the CRT, the first time we accidentally emailed the wrong person or realized belatedly that there was no way to UN-send a message that should have been left unsent. Dialing in on the "blazing fast" 14.4 baud modem on a shiny new Mac Classic - the groaning staticky squeal it made as it connected, the pain of not being able to make a phone call because your roommate was checking his mail.
But what I think resonates most with me, as far as Tales from 1999 goes, is that it was the year some guy named Matt built a website with a blue background where people could comment at will. I think I stumbled across it about a year later, while in grad school, and have been hanging around here ever since. I even eventually opened an account, after the Great Lock-Out was lifted. Funny how those things work, huh?
It's strange to look back on it all. It changed really fast. The internet that I had starting college in '92 was way different than it was for kids in '99, and it's just gotten more complicated since then. And it's funny to see people wax nostalgic about things like this, because my memories of the same things go deeper. I'm sure that other folks here would look at my college memories and laugh at my naive youthfulness, then put me in my place by regaling me with tales of the Elder Days when computer access meant knowing a guy with ability to connect to the campus mainframe...
posted by caution live frogs at 10:09 AM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
In my fourth grade G&T class
jesus things do change fast, I'm barely a couple years older than you but I didn't really learn about gin and tonics until college
posted by queenofbithynia at 10:11 AM on January 9, 2017 [29 favorites]
jesus things do change fast, I'm barely a couple years older than you but I didn't really learn about gin and tonics until college
posted by queenofbithynia at 10:11 AM on January 9, 2017 [29 favorites]
Oooh and I almost forgot, that one lab in the math building with a few NeXT cubes available... those were fun to tinker around on. Sometimes I think I should have taken some comp sci classes, instead of all that biology...
posted by caution live frogs at 10:11 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by caution live frogs at 10:11 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Changing the .plan of someone who left themselves logged in in the lab! Fun times.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 10:13 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by rabbitrabbit at 10:13 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I would have gone completely spare if I'd had to go through this by 1999:
What I remember of the late 90s:
Laboriously downloading each MP3 off an album I had no chance of affording (my dad couldn't afford lunch money, much less an allowance) from IRC or an FTP server somewhere, and then Napster being a revelation. Carefully burning these MP3s back to CDs because how else was I going to play them.
Yahoo purchasing Geocities and that seeming like the end of the world. Refusing to browse with JavaScript on because there was no way anybody would ever do anything useful with it. Moyra's Web Jewels, RIP. Buttons with the text carefully applied in a pirated version of Photoshop, and the madness of not having whatever fancy font she was using but not wanting to just use stock buttons like a peon.
posted by Sequence at 10:18 AM on January 9, 2017
The real way to get his attention, which I always wanted but only fitfully received, was through email, sent the way we all sent email on campus: telnet.Not that I wasn't fine using a shell at that point. I was. But GUI email clients had existed for awhile by that point. By 1999, it was already pretty rare for people to actually be using the shell-based client (tinyfugue) for the telnet-based games I was playing; the GUI ones had more features and were easier to use. I don't think I'd quite internalized that the university experience at that point was going to involve more universal use of computers... but also the usual institutional late-adopter lag.
What I remember of the late 90s:
Laboriously downloading each MP3 off an album I had no chance of affording (my dad couldn't afford lunch money, much less an allowance) from IRC or an FTP server somewhere, and then Napster being a revelation. Carefully burning these MP3s back to CDs because how else was I going to play them.
Yahoo purchasing Geocities and that seeming like the end of the world. Refusing to browse with JavaScript on because there was no way anybody would ever do anything useful with it. Moyra's Web Jewels, RIP. Buttons with the text carefully applied in a pirated version of Photoshop, and the madness of not having whatever fancy font she was using but not wanting to just use stock buttons like a peon.
posted by Sequence at 10:18 AM on January 9, 2017
It was embarrassing at the time, but now I'm really proud that I was the gay dude at a small liberal arts college having other gay dudes I met online come visit me on campus before all the other kids were doing it. (We actually exchanged photos via snail mail because it was too difficult to do it another way.)
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:19 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:19 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Memories of 1999 - Discovering Google, IMDB, and eBay. Being very annoyed that cable broadband was being test marketed in a city next to the one I lived in.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:20 AM on January 9, 2017
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:20 AM on January 9, 2017
I did much of my grad work on a computer that had a fountain in front of the main campus library as part of its cooling system. Now I have a computer that's faster, has more internal storage and I don't have to program with paper cards. I use it to take pictures of my cats mostly, and send short messages to my wife about how we need to get more milk.
posted by bonehead at 10:31 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by bonehead at 10:31 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I was a college freshman in 99, and not only did we have ethernet, but my college gave a big old “LOL nope” when they were sent a letter warning them to shut down student access to Napster. I remember loving them for that.
I used telnet, but I was definitely never cool enough to know about FINGER.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:39 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I used telnet, but I was definitely never cool enough to know about FINGER.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 10:39 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
As someone who was a young adult in the late 1990s, including some college years, it was pretty exciting participating in those formative years of the public Internet. I wonder if I'll ever get to feel that way about emerging, world-changing technology again. I hope I get to see the transition to self-driving cars, and the safe freedom of movement it offers. I hope I'll be around for the rise of vat-grown meat, and the access to clean, inexpensive nutrition it will provide. And I'm excited at the prospect of widely available, easy-to-use Augmented Reality. The future is amazing if we can just get there.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to edit the autoexec.bat file in all of the computer lab PCs to insert a hilarious fake error message.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 10:40 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to edit the autoexec.bat file in all of the computer lab PCs to insert a hilarious fake error message.
posted by Hot Pastrami! at 10:40 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
Oh man, yeah. The college T1 lines were *mind blowing* compared to what the average home had at the time. Those were the days.
britney-spears-metallica-blink182-redhead_xxx.mp3.mpeg.rar
posted by lazaruslong at 10:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [9 favorites]
britney-spears-metallica-blink182-redhead_xxx.mp3.mpeg.rar
posted by lazaruslong at 10:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [9 favorites]
We got dialup AOL at my house in 1998, when I was 12. The summer of 1999 sticks in my memory because my Internet friends from the forums at salon.com sent me postcards at sleep-away camp (I wasn't allowed to give them my home address) and I didn't get to watch the season 3 finale of Buffy until I got home. But I did manage to convince someone (could it have been my parents? that seems unlikely) to mail me a printed-out transcript of the episode.
posted by nonasuch at 10:55 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by nonasuch at 10:55 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
My dad was in the computer networking business back in '93, and it's crazy how much of the stuff I grew up with (I was 13 in '93) turned out to be dead-end technologies (Token Ring, Bayan, IPX, and other things that TCP/IP and Ethernet pushed out), or just because unpopular (Gopher, Finger, Telnet, IRC, FTP, ISDN to the home, etc.) once "websites" and DSL became what people considered "The Internet".
So, when I started college (CSUN!) in '99, I was the asshole who reminded my fellow students that HTTP was just one of many protocols, that of course dumping a "ftp://" URL into the browser doesn't work. You wouldn't use a hammer to take the lug nuts off your car I mean come on *snort*.
Well, I definitely lost that battle.
posted by sideshow at 11:01 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
So, when I started college (CSUN!) in '99, I was the asshole who reminded my fellow students that HTTP was just one of many protocols, that of course dumping a "ftp://" URL into the browser doesn't work. You wouldn't use a hammer to take the lug nuts off your car I mean come on *snort*.
Well, I definitely lost that battle.
posted by sideshow at 11:01 AM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
Ha! ISDN. I wrote a research paper on how ISDN would be able to revolutionize connectivity to the home in 1991. Ah, college.
By the time I graduated in 1992, the dorms were all Ethernet wired. Though I did go to a particularly techy school. Usenet, andrew, and finger were covered in freshman orientation in '88.
Finger would never get past the censors today.
posted by rich at 11:08 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
By the time I graduated in 1992, the dorms were all Ethernet wired. Though I did go to a particularly techy school. Usenet, andrew, and finger were covered in freshman orientation in '88.
Finger would never get past the censors today.
posted by rich at 11:08 AM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I graduated college in 1994, at a small local branch of a state university. I think there were a couple of computers in the library that could connect to what passed for the internet at that time, and the school newspaper had email (but it was rarely used).
In the spring of my senior year, I was asked to join a faculty committee as a student representative. The topic? "Should we bring the internet to our campus?" There was much discussion about who seriously would use it, what infrastructure we'd need to connect to it, how much it would cost, and most importantly, how to present the extra fees to students so there wouldn't be a campus-wide revolt. I suggested transparency as the best way to present it. Tell them yes, there's a tuition hike, but it's going to be used for some pretty cool technology they'd enjoy, like email, and bulletin boards and stuff. Mind you, I'd never been online myself at that point. Just read about it in magazines and seen it on TV!
posted by jhope71 at 11:09 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
In the spring of my senior year, I was asked to join a faculty committee as a student representative. The topic? "Should we bring the internet to our campus?" There was much discussion about who seriously would use it, what infrastructure we'd need to connect to it, how much it would cost, and most importantly, how to present the extra fees to students so there wouldn't be a campus-wide revolt. I suggested transparency as the best way to present it. Tell them yes, there's a tuition hike, but it's going to be used for some pretty cool technology they'd enjoy, like email, and bulletin boards and stuff. Mind you, I'd never been online myself at that point. Just read about it in magazines and seen it on TV!
posted by jhope71 at 11:09 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Text-based electronic card catalogs though, those were neat; they were still new enough that the U had a huge cabinet full of actual paper cards available for the people who were too used to them to try looking through the computer for textbooks.
My college work-study job in the early 80's was doing data entry - typing the university library's card catalog, card by card, into electronic form. I wasn't a CS major, but that was my first computer-related job, and here I am 30-odd years later still in IT.*
*Except for about 4 years in the mid-90's when I was off the grid for a while for various reasons...catching up with the fast-moving technology after that was fun...
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:10 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
My college work-study job in the early 80's was doing data entry - typing the university library's card catalog, card by card, into electronic form. I wasn't a CS major, but that was my first computer-related job, and here I am 30-odd years later still in IT.*
*Except for about 4 years in the mid-90's when I was off the grid for a while for various reasons...catching up with the fast-moving technology after that was fun...
posted by Greg_Ace at 11:10 AM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Doot doot doot do-doot do-doot doot doot
Do the wustl(.edu)!
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:21 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Do the wustl(.edu)!
posted by grumpybear69 at 11:21 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I really miss AIM (and, to a lesser extent in my friend group anyway, ICQ) and some of its associated social conventions. At least when I was in college, AIM was the dominant platform and it was by far the most common method of keeping in touch with not only other people on campus, but also other friends at home.
Away messages in particular were neat, and they have sadly died out with Google Messenger / Apple iMessage / SMS-instead-of-IMs. I guess Twitter is the closest thing now to how my friends and I used to use away messages, but it's not quite the same: away messages were ephemeral, and only visible to people who had you in their buddy list, not permanent and public. But at least at my alma mater, you could get a pretty good idea of what was going on around campus just by scanning down a reasonably-big AIM buddy list and looking at the various status lines.
The move to mobile has made text-based communication more ubiquitous, but there's a difference in how people tend to do texting (or GChat, or whatever) on a phone vs. the way it tends to happen when you're at a computer. When you're texting someone via their phone, the conversation tends to be much more asynchronous. There's an understanding, at least it seems, that the other person is going to be going about their day, and will respond periodically. With AIM, there was an assumption that the other person was either seated at their computer, or they weren't, and so if you were talking to someone, it felt a lot more like a conversation. Sure, they might be multitasking (that was sort of the beauty of it, vs. the telephone), but conversations seemed to move a lot faster than they do over SMS.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:35 AM on January 9, 2017 [8 favorites]
Away messages in particular were neat, and they have sadly died out with Google Messenger / Apple iMessage / SMS-instead-of-IMs. I guess Twitter is the closest thing now to how my friends and I used to use away messages, but it's not quite the same: away messages were ephemeral, and only visible to people who had you in their buddy list, not permanent and public. But at least at my alma mater, you could get a pretty good idea of what was going on around campus just by scanning down a reasonably-big AIM buddy list and looking at the various status lines.
The move to mobile has made text-based communication more ubiquitous, but there's a difference in how people tend to do texting (or GChat, or whatever) on a phone vs. the way it tends to happen when you're at a computer. When you're texting someone via their phone, the conversation tends to be much more asynchronous. There's an understanding, at least it seems, that the other person is going to be going about their day, and will respond periodically. With AIM, there was an assumption that the other person was either seated at their computer, or they weren't, and so if you were talking to someone, it felt a lot more like a conversation. Sure, they might be multitasking (that was sort of the beauty of it, vs. the telephone), but conversations seemed to move a lot faster than they do over SMS.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:35 AM on January 9, 2017 [8 favorites]
So.
Internet at college ('98) was both different and similar to internet prior to it, for me. I had spent the early '90s on a succession of ever "faster" modems (topping out at 33.6 Kb/s), but as luck would have it, my tiny town got wired for cable modems really early. I'm almost positive they did it because they were advertising its up-and-coming-ness with ads that mentioned how many communities were already wired, and my town of less than 10,000 residents could probably be wired in like a weekend.
So, from around ... I want to say '95, I had a 1.5 Mb/s cable modem connection. It was glorious, and I got up to no end of trouble with it. I ran FTP sites and shitty MUDs and was in constant IRC access, etc. Usenet, oh, Usenet.
Then, I got to college -- 10 (later 100) Mb ethernet! Oh lord, so much fun. So many on-campus LAN games. Filesharing was nuts. (I was later in off-campus housing on a shared 10Mb LOS radio link, which was nowhere near as fun -- a couple file sharers could wreck the bandwidth so hard).
And yet despite that, a lot of terminal stuff was everyday use, regardless of major (granted: technical school). You could use an external mail client, but everyone used Pine at least some of the time (the school even had honest-to-god vt terminals [not full featured PCs with emulators, but actual terminals] in common areas used almost exclusively for email access). Use of finger, talk, etc, was also super common. The school had some local Usenet groups (including one just for students to make fun of each other on). Plus, 80% of the lab space was graphical Unix terminals (NCD XTerms, some B&W, some color) hooked into a series of systems with shared home directories behind a round robin DNS entry. You had to go to a special Windows lab to be on a system that had all-local hardware.
I remember so much AIM and ICQ (away messages, oh god). I remember Palm Pilots being a thing -- portable computers, but not in any way internet connected. I remember when WiFi first rolled out. I remember a good friend of mine having an honest-to-god wearable computer with always-on connectivity, when that shit was so early on it was like having half a Borg costume.
And yet, as the article says, it was in many ways not quite real. Even in as connected a campus as I was on, it was nothing like the always-on connectivity of today. There's ways that's good, and there's ways that's bad, but it was definitely very starkly different.
posted by tocts at 11:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Internet at college ('98) was both different and similar to internet prior to it, for me. I had spent the early '90s on a succession of ever "faster" modems (topping out at 33.6 Kb/s), but as luck would have it, my tiny town got wired for cable modems really early. I'm almost positive they did it because they were advertising its up-and-coming-ness with ads that mentioned how many communities were already wired, and my town of less than 10,000 residents could probably be wired in like a weekend.
So, from around ... I want to say '95, I had a 1.5 Mb/s cable modem connection. It was glorious, and I got up to no end of trouble with it. I ran FTP sites and shitty MUDs and was in constant IRC access, etc. Usenet, oh, Usenet.
Then, I got to college -- 10 (later 100) Mb ethernet! Oh lord, so much fun. So many on-campus LAN games. Filesharing was nuts. (I was later in off-campus housing on a shared 10Mb LOS radio link, which was nowhere near as fun -- a couple file sharers could wreck the bandwidth so hard).
And yet despite that, a lot of terminal stuff was everyday use, regardless of major (granted: technical school). You could use an external mail client, but everyone used Pine at least some of the time (the school even had honest-to-god vt terminals [not full featured PCs with emulators, but actual terminals] in common areas used almost exclusively for email access). Use of finger, talk, etc, was also super common. The school had some local Usenet groups (including one just for students to make fun of each other on). Plus, 80% of the lab space was graphical Unix terminals (NCD XTerms, some B&W, some color) hooked into a series of systems with shared home directories behind a round robin DNS entry. You had to go to a special Windows lab to be on a system that had all-local hardware.
I remember so much AIM and ICQ (away messages, oh god). I remember Palm Pilots being a thing -- portable computers, but not in any way internet connected. I remember when WiFi first rolled out. I remember a good friend of mine having an honest-to-god wearable computer with always-on connectivity, when that shit was so early on it was like having half a Borg costume.
And yet, as the article says, it was in many ways not quite real. Even in as connected a campus as I was on, it was nothing like the always-on connectivity of today. There's ways that's good, and there's ways that's bad, but it was definitely very starkly different.
posted by tocts at 11:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I miss AIM too. I had an embarrassing username though. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
posted by lazaruslong at 11:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by lazaruslong at 11:41 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I don't quite remember my AIM username, but I do (somehow) remember my first AOL username, circa 1993-1994: "FoxMul6691". Because that's just how we did it on AOL.
posted by tobascodagama at 11:59 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 11:59 AM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Nice insight, Kaidin2048. That whole space of, 'sitting down at a computer to have a conversation with someone' has both collapsed and fractured into the splintered application ecosystem(s) we have now.
I know I haven't done it outside of a work context in...a decade? Maybe 15 years? No one younger than me that I know does it at all-- there's entirely different platforms and modes of interaction centered around 'updates' which tend towards Pithy Exchanges of Internet Showmanship. Which is fine. But different.
posted by mrdaneri at 12:00 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I know I haven't done it outside of a work context in...a decade? Maybe 15 years? No one younger than me that I know does it at all-- there's entirely different platforms and modes of interaction centered around 'updates' which tend towards Pithy Exchanges of Internet Showmanship. Which is fine. But different.
posted by mrdaneri at 12:00 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
"What's your ICQ Number"
Wow. Although ICQ hasn't even crossed my mind in at least 15 years I immediately said out-loud,"1182883"
posted by crayon at 12:03 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Wow. Although ICQ hasn't even crossed my mind in at least 15 years I immediately said out-loud,"1182883"
posted by crayon at 12:03 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I think about this so often. I can remember being part of a small group of "advanced" kids in the librarian's office, learning how to get onto the internet for the first time. This was probably around 1996. But then suddenly the internet was everywhere, and by the time I was done high school, I'd say at least 70% of my classmates had the internet at home. But I don't understand what happened between that one afternoon in the librarian's office, and everything that came after. It seems so sudden--I just can't remember the period of time between "this is a thing that a few people can access" to "this is a thing everybody must access."
I also remember the day that my dad had our first internet connection installed. I waited like 20 minutes for the MuchMusic page to load, only to accidentally close the window. Ah, youth!
posted by Mrs. Rattery at 12:11 PM on January 9, 2017
I also remember the day that my dad had our first internet connection installed. I waited like 20 minutes for the MuchMusic page to load, only to accidentally close the window. Ah, youth!
posted by Mrs. Rattery at 12:11 PM on January 9, 2017
"I don't quite remember my AIM username..."
I remember mine, because it's the same as my MeFi username, and nearly every other username I've ever used. And also, because it's my first and last name, and I hope I don't forget that.
"I had an embarrassing username though"
In keeping with the "we weren't as enlightened as we are now" theme of the article, I had a second username, uhavherpes. So yeah, sometimes change isn't bad.
posted by kevinbelt at 12:15 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I remember mine, because it's the same as my MeFi username, and nearly every other username I've ever used. And also, because it's my first and last name, and I hope I don't forget that.
"I had an embarrassing username though"
In keeping with the "we weren't as enlightened as we are now" theme of the article, I had a second username, uhavherpes. So yeah, sometimes change isn't bad.
posted by kevinbelt at 12:15 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
We used to set up our .plan files to print out banners and multiple ^G noisy beeps. I only remembered this because I just fingered an old account and there it was!
posted by Obscure Reference at 12:25 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by Obscure Reference at 12:25 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I graduated undergrad in 94, and I remember getting my first college email account around then. And "surfing" (as it was) the "internet" on Netscape, thinking "...that's it? Meh."
Also, the feeling that back Yahoo's subjects lists actually contained most of what was online on things like, say, traveling in Kenya or weightlifting.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:29 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Also, the feeling that back Yahoo's subjects lists actually contained most of what was online on things like, say, traveling in Kenya or weightlifting.
posted by gottabefunky at 12:29 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I thought it had jumped the shark by 1999. I could have done without pictures.
Telnet forever! Pour one out for Unix! (1992 adopter)
posted by Miko at 12:42 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
Telnet forever! Pour one out for Unix! (1992 adopter)
posted by Miko at 12:42 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I changed my .plan to
posted by rlk at 12:43 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Your finger has been noted and logged.People would ask me about it with a mixture of horror and curiosity.
posted by rlk at 12:43 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Oh yeah. And it wasn't available in dorms. Only at two computer labs. Awkward sometimes - the priority access rules did not favor BBSes, MUDs, and trolling ftp sites for quirky curiosities.
posted by Miko at 12:44 PM on January 9, 2017
posted by Miko at 12:44 PM on January 9, 2017
I was a senior in High School in 1996. I talked the school librarian into letting me use the ONE INTERNET COMPUTER on campus between 6:30-7:00 am every morning. My bus would drop me off early and the school was empty except for me and the early bird librarian.
Little did she know I was A/S/L'ing with people all over the world in the chat rooms, and having an "online boyfriend" in Slovenia. I almost ran off with him. All thanks to the wild world of the early internet and one oblivious librarian who thought I was doing research at 6:30 am.
posted by Elly Vortex at 12:45 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Little did she know I was A/S/L'ing with people all over the world in the chat rooms, and having an "online boyfriend" in Slovenia. I almost ran off with him. All thanks to the wild world of the early internet and one oblivious librarian who thought I was doing research at 6:30 am.
posted by Elly Vortex at 12:45 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I can't believe we're talking about the late-90s internet and not once has the dreaded phrase "Onramp to the Information Superhighway!" appeared.
(Well, okay, once.)
posted by hangashore at 12:48 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
(Well, okay, once.)
posted by hangashore at 12:48 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
Back in 1999 or so I found much of my online reading material on Arts & Letters Daily. And, incredibly, 20 years later, it looks exactly the same, except that my monitor has a better resolution, and the browser renders fonts a bit more cleanly.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 12:55 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by paper chromatographologist at 12:55 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
Similarly to ALDaily, around that time I was a big fan of Coudal Partners' Fresh Signals, still going strong.
posted by Miko at 12:58 PM on January 9, 2017
posted by Miko at 12:58 PM on January 9, 2017
Remember when Novell was a thing? And it would store user credentials in a barely encrypted .pwl file locally on a machine in the computer lab? Those were fun times.
posted by lazaruslong at 12:58 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by lazaruslong at 12:58 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
My AIM username was MetalVolt. Because I thought that electricity and...metal... were super metal I guess. Also it was 1997 and I was 14.
posted by lazaruslong at 1:02 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by lazaruslong at 1:02 PM on January 9, 2017 [3 favorites]
I have always enjoyed the symbolism of getting introduced to Mosaic in the middle of a deconsecrated seminary chapel. Going from an undergraduate experience spent on gopher and telnet to a graduate school experience on the Web ... truly, light through a stained glass window and a whole new way of looking at the world.
Although I'm older than AHP, she does nicely capture the liminal feel of being online in the 1990s. I had always suspected my own feelings of liminality were due to reading too much sci-fi and letting that color my perceptions, so I appreciate her drawing the lines between online/not-online and examining the giddy potential and sober consideration in each.
posted by sobell at 1:55 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Although I'm older than AHP, she does nicely capture the liminal feel of being online in the 1990s. I had always suspected my own feelings of liminality were due to reading too much sci-fi and letting that color my perceptions, so I appreciate her drawing the lines between online/not-online and examining the giddy potential and sober consideration in each.
posted by sobell at 1:55 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
The place I miss most about the late-90s Internet is Yahoo chatrooms. You may remember them as bleak wastelands of "wanna cyber?", and to be fair they largely were, but Religion:1 was a little haven. I remember one of those "I, your brave journalist, ventured onto The Internet!" articles you used to get all the time where the author investigated chatrooms, and he described how all of them were just silence or people hitting on him with "hai baby asl?????" - except this one, where everyone was already in the middle of some argument about atheism when he arrived, and the first thing anyone said to him was to correct his spelling of Feuerbach.
It was a weird place, tucked in alongside a lot of faith-specific chatrooms. ("No, sorry, Christian chat is down the corridor on the right - the far right.") It ended up populated with people who just liked talking about religion, from the evangelical Christians out to convert the lost to the evangelical atheists out to spread the word of Dawkins (like, er, me at the time) to the conspiracy theorists to the theology students. Once everyone had rattled through their usual lines and arguments, people would actually talk. It was fighty, but it was a community, too.
That place radically broadened my horizons. More than anything else on the internet at the time, more than most stuff off the internet at the time. All these ideas, all these complex arguments about ethics or political philosophy or foreign policy. I knew all these things existed, but the idea that you could care about them outside the confines of a classroom, and talk about them and learn about them and be involved in these conversations yourself rather than being the passive recipient of a summary in a book - that was life-changing to my eighteen-year-old self.
And the people! I had never met such a varied crowd of people, not online or off. Fundamentalist gun-loving American conservatives, Canadian Baha'is, a kid from the Middle East who chanted parts of the Quran to us on voice chat when that arrived. (Dreamer87_ksa, wherever you are, I hope you're doing well now.) Angry vegan guy who used to get furious about honey. Seminary students, philosophy students, waitresses, hairdressers (she did a blog about her job for a while and it was hilarious and I wish I remembered the URL for the wayback machine), corporate suburban Satanists. You got to know people.
I ended up drifting away after my ex-boyfriend decided he wanted to hang around there too and make friends with everybody (the fucker), and I'm only in touch with one of the other regulars now, vaguely on Twitter. I still wonder how everyone else is getting on.
Anyway, my point is that the late-90s internet I knew probably was a bubble but it was still a much bigger and broader bubble than the one I'd been living in before. It gave me a lot of opportunity to procrastinate away my studies in a computer lab, and in retrospect I could probably have spent less time working out how to get those Ally McBeal dancing babies to appear on my Geocities homepage, but it was also genuinely good for me. I was connecting with people I would not otherwise have met, about subjects I would otherwise have only been reading or daydreaming about. That's what I miss.
(and to any former Religion:1 regs: SeptemberBlue919 says hi.)
posted by Catseye at 1:57 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
It was a weird place, tucked in alongside a lot of faith-specific chatrooms. ("No, sorry, Christian chat is down the corridor on the right - the far right.") It ended up populated with people who just liked talking about religion, from the evangelical Christians out to convert the lost to the evangelical atheists out to spread the word of Dawkins (like, er, me at the time) to the conspiracy theorists to the theology students. Once everyone had rattled through their usual lines and arguments, people would actually talk. It was fighty, but it was a community, too.
That place radically broadened my horizons. More than anything else on the internet at the time, more than most stuff off the internet at the time. All these ideas, all these complex arguments about ethics or political philosophy or foreign policy. I knew all these things existed, but the idea that you could care about them outside the confines of a classroom, and talk about them and learn about them and be involved in these conversations yourself rather than being the passive recipient of a summary in a book - that was life-changing to my eighteen-year-old self.
And the people! I had never met such a varied crowd of people, not online or off. Fundamentalist gun-loving American conservatives, Canadian Baha'is, a kid from the Middle East who chanted parts of the Quran to us on voice chat when that arrived. (Dreamer87_ksa, wherever you are, I hope you're doing well now.) Angry vegan guy who used to get furious about honey. Seminary students, philosophy students, waitresses, hairdressers (she did a blog about her job for a while and it was hilarious and I wish I remembered the URL for the wayback machine), corporate suburban Satanists. You got to know people.
I ended up drifting away after my ex-boyfriend decided he wanted to hang around there too and make friends with everybody (the fucker), and I'm only in touch with one of the other regulars now, vaguely on Twitter. I still wonder how everyone else is getting on.
Anyway, my point is that the late-90s internet I knew probably was a bubble but it was still a much bigger and broader bubble than the one I'd been living in before. It gave me a lot of opportunity to procrastinate away my studies in a computer lab, and in retrospect I could probably have spent less time working out how to get those Ally McBeal dancing babies to appear on my Geocities homepage, but it was also genuinely good for me. I was connecting with people I would not otherwise have met, about subjects I would otherwise have only been reading or daydreaming about. That's what I miss.
(and to any former Religion:1 regs: SeptemberBlue919 says hi.)
posted by Catseye at 1:57 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
In 1997 (or 1996? Somewhere in the first couple of years of university), my buddy had a laptop. (I was still typing stuff on an inherited typewriter. An electronic one, but still. In 96, actually, I handed in a hand-written paper. Pushed it as far as I could, really). I remember him showing it to me, and being confused about where you had to type your email info to get at your e-mails. (In the top bar? The "address" bar? Makes sense because you have an email address, right?)
I've also been at school sort of lately, and holy hell, my back feels so much better than it did in 96-00. (Because I might need all the books...) Back then, I had a head-forward posture, and regular headaches as a result. Haven't thought about it in ages but love off-site (online) access to the library catalogue, LOVE it.
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:02 PM on January 9, 2017
I've also been at school sort of lately, and holy hell, my back feels so much better than it did in 96-00. (Because I might need all the books...) Back then, I had a head-forward posture, and regular headaches as a result. Haven't thought about it in ages but love off-site (online) access to the library catalogue, LOVE it.
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:02 PM on January 9, 2017
Oh yeah, and my roommate had a dot-matrix printer she'd inherited from her sister. (We didn't think this internet thing would take off)
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:05 PM on January 9, 2017
posted by cotton dress sock at 2:05 PM on January 9, 2017
I graduated from college in 1991. My high school had VAX terminals I used to exchange messages with other students, but that was it. I did have a used Mac to type papers with by my college days, but to give you an idea of the general environment:
* I never used the college-assigned email account (or any email account really).
* I finished 4th semester calculus using graph paper (I never had a graphing calculator).
* Checking grades was via walking to the professor's office and looking at paper taped to the wall.
* Registering for classes was via combo of a very lengthy phone queue/standing in a long line looking at a huge printout of all the sections.
* Students with any sort of electronic device in a classroom: not a thing. Well, maybe the occasional voice recorder.
* My post-college band (early/mid-Nineties) lived, got popular, and died without a web page or any music available online anywhere. Stuffing 7" records into envelopes and mailing them, checking a PO box for fan letters or other updates a couple of times a week.
Seems so very long ago ...
posted by freecellwizard at 3:17 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
* I never used the college-assigned email account (or any email account really).
* I finished 4th semester calculus using graph paper (I never had a graphing calculator).
* Checking grades was via walking to the professor's office and looking at paper taped to the wall.
* Registering for classes was via combo of a very lengthy phone queue/standing in a long line looking at a huge printout of all the sections.
* Students with any sort of electronic device in a classroom: not a thing. Well, maybe the occasional voice recorder.
* My post-college band (early/mid-Nineties) lived, got popular, and died without a web page or any music available online anywhere. Stuffing 7" records into envelopes and mailing them, checking a PO box for fan letters or other updates a couple of times a week.
Seems so very long ago ...
posted by freecellwizard at 3:17 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
My nostalgia of that period--outside college, mind--is this: As a "good" and "known" freelance web dev, I made more money (considered both as an absolute number and as "constant dollars"), and worked on more interesting projects in 1999 and 2000, than I have since. In real dollars I'd be surprised if I make even a third of what I did then, and what I have to deliver is miles more technical and involved than anything I did then.
I also miss the "pre-seo" internet, where oddballs put up web pages about cool stuff, and if you put up your own page of cool stuff, you'd have a pretty good chance of "meeting" an Important Person. I miss suck.com. I miss that sense that lots of great, cool stuff was coming.
I dropped out of university in 1988. I don't think I ever did anything on a computer there, aside from typing papers on my Apple IIc, at home.
posted by maxwelton at 3:39 PM on January 9, 2017 [5 favorites]
I also miss the "pre-seo" internet, where oddballs put up web pages about cool stuff, and if you put up your own page of cool stuff, you'd have a pretty good chance of "meeting" an Important Person. I miss suck.com. I miss that sense that lots of great, cool stuff was coming.
I dropped out of university in 1988. I don't think I ever did anything on a computer there, aside from typing papers on my Apple IIc, at home.
posted by maxwelton at 3:39 PM on January 9, 2017 [5 favorites]
I started college in 1996, and also went to a small liberal arts college, so this all rings very true (though mine was more diverse and activisty and my two advisors were a Black Feminist and a post-colonial feminist theorist, so I lucked out there with the intersectionality training!).
I also had telnet as my first email address, but I never knew about Finger! Probably better that way, since I can only imagine the obsessive ends to which I would have used it.
I remember when I moved into my freshman year dorm, I was supposed to get ethernet, but it wasn't working, and I never got around to asking for help. So I just didn't have internet in my room, and that didn't seem like a problem at all, because, hey, I had access to computer labs, didn't I? Even when I moved off-campus, I still just used the internet on campus. That seems crazy now, when I feel bereft if I have to go two hours without my iPhone.
I kind of miss the websites of the late 90s and early 2000s. I remember I caught the travel bug bad on my study abroad experience and spent basically all of senior year reading every geocities page about backpacking through Asia or volunteering in Ecuador. You don't really get that kind of amateur travel storytelling anymore. The travel blogs that exist are more professional and all seem to be run by people who also want you to buy their e-book about how they travel the world while working remotely. People who just want to let their friends know how their trips are going do it through instagram (where it's harder to find) or Facebook (where it's impossible to find) and people who want to give travel advice do it through forums or review sites. Which is nice, but not nearly as fun.
posted by lunasol at 3:45 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I also had telnet as my first email address, but I never knew about Finger! Probably better that way, since I can only imagine the obsessive ends to which I would have used it.
I remember when I moved into my freshman year dorm, I was supposed to get ethernet, but it wasn't working, and I never got around to asking for help. So I just didn't have internet in my room, and that didn't seem like a problem at all, because, hey, I had access to computer labs, didn't I? Even when I moved off-campus, I still just used the internet on campus. That seems crazy now, when I feel bereft if I have to go two hours without my iPhone.
I kind of miss the websites of the late 90s and early 2000s. I remember I caught the travel bug bad on my study abroad experience and spent basically all of senior year reading every geocities page about backpacking through Asia or volunteering in Ecuador. You don't really get that kind of amateur travel storytelling anymore. The travel blogs that exist are more professional and all seem to be run by people who also want you to buy their e-book about how they travel the world while working remotely. People who just want to let their friends know how their trips are going do it through instagram (where it's harder to find) or Facebook (where it's impossible to find) and people who want to give travel advice do it through forums or review sites. Which is nice, but not nearly as fun.
posted by lunasol at 3:45 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
My sister and her husband maintain a really old email server severed from the internet that just runs PINE so they can keep record of their their long distance correspondence. It's like Letters in the Time of Cholera if we finally acknowledge Tom Green's career was like Cholera.
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:08 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by Nanukthedog at 4:08 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
Just now making the connection: AIM Away messages were .plan files for normies.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:22 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 4:22 PM on January 9, 2017 [4 favorites]
Raise your hand if you ever thought of making the last line of your plan file be
You have new mail.posted by Space Coyote at 5:03 PM on January 9, 2017
I'm not discounting her experiences because I realize experiences are inherently personal. But I started college in 1998 & I'd already spent a few years on the usenet & built a few websites at that point. And starting with my class, all freshmen were required to have their own computers (they were pushing laptops but then it just became "fine, a computer.) Our dorms had, I believe, T3 lines or at least T1 -- I don't remember (this was right on the cusp of Napster, but were were encouraged to share MP3s over the network). I just remember us all being online, all the time.
It's true, though, that there were fewer cell phones (I think my roommate had one our junior year) and not the same level of the "Internet is always in your pocket" thing at all. I had friends who didn't have computers or email when they were off-campus (but I thought that was weird).
It was a bit later (mid-2000), but LiveJournal was a proto-social network. I made some good friends there and strengthened some friendships I already had. I'm still in touch with so many of those people. I think that's awesome.
I'm slightly nostalgic for this time period, although I never ever want to be 19 again or anything. Just ... I can't even imagine the trouble I would've gotten myself into if I was 19 now. The internet was still a scary, messy place when I was younger but it felt much smaller and safer. I am happy with the person it made me.
posted by darksong at 5:13 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
It's true, though, that there were fewer cell phones (I think my roommate had one our junior year) and not the same level of the "Internet is always in your pocket" thing at all. I had friends who didn't have computers or email when they were off-campus (but I thought that was weird).
It was a bit later (mid-2000), but LiveJournal was a proto-social network. I made some good friends there and strengthened some friendships I already had. I'm still in touch with so many of those people. I think that's awesome.
I'm slightly nostalgic for this time period, although I never ever want to be 19 again or anything. Just ... I can't even imagine the trouble I would've gotten myself into if I was 19 now. The internet was still a scary, messy place when I was younger but it felt much smaller and safer. I am happy with the person it made me.
posted by darksong at 5:13 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Raise your hand if you ever thought of making the last line of your plan file be
posted by entropicamericana at 5:25 PM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
You have new mail.it is hard to believe there was a time i looked forward to new email
posted by entropicamericana at 5:25 PM on January 9, 2017 [7 favorites]
The 90's were also an interesting time because many schools knew they should transition to digital something, but no idea how. One school in Georgia I attended from 93-95 had a junior programming elective, but the pre-req was a semester of word processing (learning Word Perfect macros on what at the time might have been 10 year old machines) and the pre-req for that class was a semester of typing. On electric typewriters.
I appreciate the need to know how to type, but making the first step for students interested in computers be a class involving correction fluid was a strange one.
posted by thecjm at 5:39 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
I appreciate the need to know how to type, but making the first step for students interested in computers be a class involving correction fluid was a strange one.
posted by thecjm at 5:39 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
thought of? Yeah, that's what my .plan ended with.
posted by tss at 5:53 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by tss at 5:53 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
The first time I saw two-factor authentication was visiting the AOL HQ in Virginia in summer of 2001? 2002? Everyone with access on the corporate side had to wear a dongle around their neck and they not only signed in to their account, but then ALSO had to two in a randomly-generated number that changed every 30 seconds or so that was beamed to their dongle. But only when they were on corporate campus; otherwise they couldn't access the corporate-side stuff. I remember thinking, "Geez, that's a lot of security, maybe an unreasonable amount!" Little did I know!
(I was interning at a press freedom organization and we went to visit AOL because they were emerging as a media outlet and our press freedom group was in ongoing talks with their news department about how and in what ways online media might need and seek traditional press freedom support. I wish I'd known what the future would be like because I think that set of meetings would have been WAY MORE INTERESTING had I known what was coming with online media, security, AOL in general ...)
What I remember about college computing in 1999 was always-on AIM. Also that our high-speed ethernet had been installed in the dorm by then after months and months and months of non-stop jackhammering and lots of power outages when they ran ethernet wiring through our 1893(-ish? I think?) dorm and its run-in-pipes-on-the-exterior-of-the-walls electrical conduits. Sometimes if someone was moving a heavy chair and dropped it, it'd blow the electrical for the whole dorm, and we were strictly forbidden from using hair dryers or microwaves, because that'd also blow the whole dorm electricity. They also upgraded us from two-prong outlets we used with ground-lift plugs to three-prong outlets, FINALLY, but I spent two or three years using my HELLA EXPENSIVE computer on a ground-lift plug. My dorm was so unprepared for technology!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:53 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
(I was interning at a press freedom organization and we went to visit AOL because they were emerging as a media outlet and our press freedom group was in ongoing talks with their news department about how and in what ways online media might need and seek traditional press freedom support. I wish I'd known what the future would be like because I think that set of meetings would have been WAY MORE INTERESTING had I known what was coming with online media, security, AOL in general ...)
What I remember about college computing in 1999 was always-on AIM. Also that our high-speed ethernet had been installed in the dorm by then after months and months and months of non-stop jackhammering and lots of power outages when they ran ethernet wiring through our 1893(-ish? I think?) dorm and its run-in-pipes-on-the-exterior-of-the-walls electrical conduits. Sometimes if someone was moving a heavy chair and dropped it, it'd blow the electrical for the whole dorm, and we were strictly forbidden from using hair dryers or microwaves, because that'd also blow the whole dorm electricity. They also upgraded us from two-prong outlets we used with ground-lift plugs to three-prong outlets, FINALLY, but I spent two or three years using my HELLA EXPENSIVE computer on a ground-lift plug. My dorm was so unprepared for technology!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:53 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
And... yes, I'm still salty about not getting an account with all the cool kids on tilde.club.
At least I've got an RSX-11M-PLUS account over at magica.update.uu.se...
posted by tss at 5:58 PM on January 9, 2017
At least I've got an RSX-11M-PLUS account over at magica.update.uu.se...
posted by tss at 5:58 PM on January 9, 2017
I went to a small liberal arts college from 95-99. My first year, they introduced a campus wide chatroom, and it was a bit weird. You'd go downstairs to try to use the computers in the dorm (a small closet with four computers for a dorm of over 300 students) and the computers would all be taken, all by people in the chatroom. All four people, typing away at their keyboards without once speaking to the others in the room. I didn't even get a non-campus email until the spring of my senior year when I realized, hey, I probably need a way to stay in touch.
I don't in any way mean to imply that now is better than/worse than then, but the lack of cell phones, texting, anything, gave me one of the best experience I've ever had. My first year, I was in a dorm that was a solid fifteen minute walk from the rest of the campus. It was a long enough walk that if I went back, that was essentially the end of my day, I couldn't be bothered to head back down to the main campus area. There were two paths back, one through the library, and another, quieter path through the woods, along side a stagnant pond that had, a long time ago, been a river running through the campus.
It was a pretty fantastic fall day, and I really didn't want to go back to my room. I went to the library and tried calling all the people I knew from the campus phones. Those were pretty much the only way to get in touch, and it meant that I had to know all the phone numbers I was trying to call (I knew dozens of dorm room phone numbers, today I don't even know my wife's phone number without checking my phone). Every single friend I called was out of their room. I really wasn't comfortable at that age with just spending time alone, and it was really bugging me. I left the library, and happened to run into an acquaintance and his girlfriend sitting at the base of a giant tree in front of the pond. I sat and chatted with them for a bit, then gave up and headed up the path next to the pond. The sun was starting to set, and in the gloom, I saw movement in the trees. I turned, and saw an owl swooping from one tree to the next, and just stood there, in awe of the only wild owl I've ever seen, before or since.
Since then, having a phone, facebook, the ability to read Metafilter on the train on the other side of the world, it's all pretty amazing, and I wouldn't ever want to give all of that up. Still, though, that day ended up being perfect, and if I'd just been able to text a friend and gone to hang out with them, I doubt I'd have had that experience.
Mind you, traveling through Asia on a term abroad in 98 meant carrying CDs (though people were crazy about buying Mini Disc players in Tokyo), writing letters on airmail paper, and worrying that the thirty-six (!) rolls of pictures you'd taken would be destroyed by the X-ray machine.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:14 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I don't in any way mean to imply that now is better than/worse than then, but the lack of cell phones, texting, anything, gave me one of the best experience I've ever had. My first year, I was in a dorm that was a solid fifteen minute walk from the rest of the campus. It was a long enough walk that if I went back, that was essentially the end of my day, I couldn't be bothered to head back down to the main campus area. There were two paths back, one through the library, and another, quieter path through the woods, along side a stagnant pond that had, a long time ago, been a river running through the campus.
It was a pretty fantastic fall day, and I really didn't want to go back to my room. I went to the library and tried calling all the people I knew from the campus phones. Those were pretty much the only way to get in touch, and it meant that I had to know all the phone numbers I was trying to call (I knew dozens of dorm room phone numbers, today I don't even know my wife's phone number without checking my phone). Every single friend I called was out of their room. I really wasn't comfortable at that age with just spending time alone, and it was really bugging me. I left the library, and happened to run into an acquaintance and his girlfriend sitting at the base of a giant tree in front of the pond. I sat and chatted with them for a bit, then gave up and headed up the path next to the pond. The sun was starting to set, and in the gloom, I saw movement in the trees. I turned, and saw an owl swooping from one tree to the next, and just stood there, in awe of the only wild owl I've ever seen, before or since.
Since then, having a phone, facebook, the ability to read Metafilter on the train on the other side of the world, it's all pretty amazing, and I wouldn't ever want to give all of that up. Still, though, that day ended up being perfect, and if I'd just been able to text a friend and gone to hang out with them, I doubt I'd have had that experience.
Mind you, traveling through Asia on a term abroad in 98 meant carrying CDs (though people were crazy about buying Mini Disc players in Tokyo), writing letters on airmail paper, and worrying that the thirty-six (!) rolls of pictures you'd taken would be destroyed by the X-ray machine.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:14 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
Although I do remember the week where the campus wide network went down. The one (!!!) person in charge of the network broke his leg, and had essentially cadged the entire network together through luck, duct tape, and chewing gum. One of the more common rumors spread was about, somehow, Penn State, and how their network was considered so important, if it went down for more than some vanishingly small number of minutes, network admins got fired.
posted by Ghidorah at 6:24 PM on January 9, 2017
posted by Ghidorah at 6:24 PM on January 9, 2017
I was in college from 2002-2006 and when I started the Internet still wasn't much of a thing. I remember taking my school's handful of courses (2) that involved web design, because that's what I was interested in, and my self-taught ass had to teach the professors what CSS was. Everything was done on paper and no one knew what to make of this internet thing. Maybe because it was a tiny liberal arts college but it didn't get better when I moved to a bigger state school. At least they did registration online. I remember the day Facebook added photos in 2005 that was a big deal everyone went nuts.
posted by bleep at 6:48 PM on January 9, 2017
posted by bleep at 6:48 PM on January 9, 2017
The first time I saw two-factor authentication was visiting the AOL HQ in Virginia in summer of 2001? 2002? Everyone with access on the corporate side had to wear a dongle around their neck and they not only signed in to their account, but then ALSO had to two in a randomly-generated number that changed every 30 seconds or so that was beamed to their dongle.
Those were RSA SecurID dongles, I was friends with some AOL employees in 94 or 95 and they were using them back then. They even offered them to AOL customers who wanted the security of two-factor authentication from 2004 to 2009.
posted by peeedro at 7:17 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Those were RSA SecurID dongles, I was friends with some AOL employees in 94 or 95 and they were using them back then. They even offered them to AOL customers who wanted the security of two-factor authentication from 2004 to 2009.
posted by peeedro at 7:17 PM on January 9, 2017 [1 favorite]
Hey kids! Gather 'round, it's creaky nostalgia time again!
I went off to a state school in the backwaters of a backwater state in 1995. I remember having a write an essay to my school's dean (S/ARC if that means anything to anyone anymore) to get my first UNIX logon/email address. WINSOCK32 plus TELNET was my first view onto this weird landscape we now find ourselves on.
Why did I get my first account, you may ask: it was to communicate with my girlfriend who was at the time going to UIUC. She told me of wonders beyond my imagination: Netscape, USENET, IRC. So I quickly became immersed in the new language. Our small program created this newfangled things called a webpage, and sinc eI actually spent some time around that chuck of the protocol, I took my allotted account space and created a small portfolio. This was seen as such a new and astonishing thing that when my school got written up but this small startup buff book called WIRED I was Someone.
Sadly, I was more interested in the abilities of this new thing called Digital Image Processing to get involved with the really cool side of the tech, and I came out of the era mostly broke but with a few marketable skills, some of which I still use today.
I never thought of it as the Disconnected Internet Era, but so it was. I remember hooking my Newton MessagePad up to my phone line so I could download my email, the NYTimes headlines and my newsgroups to read in the short break between classes, but it never once occurred to me I could do the same thing, just in real time and without a phone line.
So that's why I'm still poor and still hacking away at various Adobe products, instead of a bazillionaire. This plus the recent Flickr news suddenly makes me feel Very Old and Lost. Which is, I guess to say that [this is good].
posted by 1f2frfbf at 7:32 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I went off to a state school in the backwaters of a backwater state in 1995. I remember having a write an essay to my school's dean (S/ARC if that means anything to anyone anymore) to get my first UNIX logon/email address. WINSOCK32 plus TELNET was my first view onto this weird landscape we now find ourselves on.
Why did I get my first account, you may ask: it was to communicate with my girlfriend who was at the time going to UIUC. She told me of wonders beyond my imagination: Netscape, USENET, IRC. So I quickly became immersed in the new language. Our small program created this newfangled things called a webpage, and sinc eI actually spent some time around that chuck of the protocol, I took my allotted account space and created a small portfolio. This was seen as such a new and astonishing thing that when my school got written up but this small startup buff book called WIRED I was Someone.
Sadly, I was more interested in the abilities of this new thing called Digital Image Processing to get involved with the really cool side of the tech, and I came out of the era mostly broke but with a few marketable skills, some of which I still use today.
I never thought of it as the Disconnected Internet Era, but so it was. I remember hooking my Newton MessagePad up to my phone line so I could download my email, the NYTimes headlines and my newsgroups to read in the short break between classes, but it never once occurred to me I could do the same thing, just in real time and without a phone line.
So that's why I'm still poor and still hacking away at various Adobe products, instead of a bazillionaire. This plus the recent Flickr news suddenly makes me feel Very Old and Lost. Which is, I guess to say that [this is good].
posted by 1f2frfbf at 7:32 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I started college in 2000, at a small liberal arts place as well. I was coming from a home that had cable internet, so I didn't notice too big of an improvement from the campus intranet. (I also remember sharing music folders with everyone in the dorm!!!). My sophomore and junior years, there were times when the campus network got extremely slow. (Probably from file sharing.) But -- a trick I learned from some of my fellow students -- I connected the built-in modem of my desktop to my dorm's campus phone jack, so I could dial in (using just a 4-digit extension) when things got rough on the ethernet side.
I wonder now if students even use the provided on-campus phone jacks, with the ridiculous long-distance plan that came with them. (We all bought long-distance calling cards to use instead.)
Back in the day, "internet memes" spread by word of mouth (I remember when "All Your Base" spread through the dorms like wildfire). We would often gather around someone's PC to watch the latest Strong Bad email.
I lived in the last residence at the University of Toronto to be wired for the Internet.
While the dorms at my place were wired by the time I got there, some of the houses off-campus that were owned by the college weren't wired yet, which led to a lot of grumbling and buying less-good private internet access to share with 8-9 people.
posted by dhens at 8:12 PM on January 9, 2017
I wonder now if students even use the provided on-campus phone jacks, with the ridiculous long-distance plan that came with them. (We all bought long-distance calling cards to use instead.)
Back in the day, "internet memes" spread by word of mouth (I remember when "All Your Base" spread through the dorms like wildfire). We would often gather around someone's PC to watch the latest Strong Bad email.
I lived in the last residence at the University of Toronto to be wired for the Internet.
While the dorms at my place were wired by the time I got there, some of the houses off-campus that were owned by the college weren't wired yet, which led to a lot of grumbling and buying less-good private internet access to share with 8-9 people.
posted by dhens at 8:12 PM on January 9, 2017
You want computer nostalgia, this reminds me of U of T in the early '80s, with those punched card readers in the computer lab (which is why I studied political economy then and had nothing to do with computers for 4 more years). Over in the zoology department Henry Spencer was doing all kinds of neat things inventing the future as we know it (writing free software libraries, archiving every single byte that flowed through utzoo on its way to other usenet sites, and other nerdy stuff). I know, a real backwater, but 10 short years later I was happy to get involved with some students doing cool internet stuff on the netspace network (2 years before the dyslexic-confounding Netscape was born) at Brown U.
posted by morspin at 8:15 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by morspin at 8:15 PM on January 9, 2017 [2 favorites]
I got lucky as a kid – for all the terrible childhood stories I have, a saving grace was parents who were drafter-designers and insisted on being cutting-edge when it came to tech. My father was among the first to use AutoCAD, and working with engineers in Finland, he designed one of the first four-button mouse tablets used with it. This was back in the 1980s. He went to Finland several times. This is a big reason I ended up going there myself nearly two decades later.
Anyway – my father had his own business in my elementary school years. My mother worked there at the time. I loved ditzing around on the PCs and Dad let me take home "obsolete" computer bits and pieces. Scare quotes because the setups he was using were the most powerful of the time; they had to be to run AutoCAD. When Mom started working at home, it got even easier to build my own PCs. Have all my life. Still use a PC I built from scratch at home.
And thus it happened as a fourteen-year-old that I got on the Internet in 1990. Gopher, BBS, later IRC. I loved gopher. It opened up the world. I was able to browse university libraries in Paris and Lyon. With talk and IRC, people from Lyon – it's (still) home to top IT schools in France, and was one of the first to go online, so there were a lot of Lyonnais on the net. Finger was how we would "meet" and pass messages when we couldn't be online.
I applied online, to the first university that offered online applications in 1994: USC. I was accepted, but chose the UO, because it had everything I wanted and needed (namely, French, Russian – which I also studied there – music, and a growing presence on the internet). Our School of Music lab had powerful Macs due to the need to run composition software. They were connected to the T1 network. I designed my personal webpage in 1994 (http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~astev hehe) and on seeing it, our tech guy asked if I wouldn't mind designing a site for the School of Music. A graphics designer friend and I got to it. I did the HTML and content, he did the layouts and images. That very same year, we had our first application request by email. Woohoo! That applicant was accepted, and we three still remember the giddy sensation of meeting In Real Life. "You're the people who designed the WEBSITE! WOW!!!" 8-)
Meanwhile I'd met a guy online – you've never heard this part of the story before. My first French boyfriend? Was a Lyonnais I'd chatted with on IRC for three years. Just so happened my university French program had an exchange program in Lyon.
After my year in Lyon, in which I finished my BA and he his degree in IT management, we went to Finland. Could the world get any smaller? My .edu account was closed, but that was okay because I had a Finnish one with an ISDN connection. This was 1998-2000. We too thought ISDN would be revolutionary.
When we went back to France in 2000, ADSL had arrived. I worked online as a translator. Got loads of work through my website. Fast-forward six years, and I was hired by my favorite client IT consultancy – one I'd also met online. The job was IRL :) Ten years later! I'm still there, thought not for much longer. Found a new job through real, live networking.
Sitting here typing this story on a forum using the Internet, as I have since age 14.
I've never forgotten the original idealism of the 'net. Bringing people together. It is the story of my life. I'll always see it that way. Corporations may and do futz it up, but people still find ways to connect.
posted by fraula at 1:57 AM on January 10, 2017 [5 favorites]
Anyway – my father had his own business in my elementary school years. My mother worked there at the time. I loved ditzing around on the PCs and Dad let me take home "obsolete" computer bits and pieces. Scare quotes because the setups he was using were the most powerful of the time; they had to be to run AutoCAD. When Mom started working at home, it got even easier to build my own PCs. Have all my life. Still use a PC I built from scratch at home.
And thus it happened as a fourteen-year-old that I got on the Internet in 1990. Gopher, BBS, later IRC. I loved gopher. It opened up the world. I was able to browse university libraries in Paris and Lyon. With talk and IRC, people from Lyon – it's (still) home to top IT schools in France, and was one of the first to go online, so there were a lot of Lyonnais on the net. Finger was how we would "meet" and pass messages when we couldn't be online.
I applied online, to the first university that offered online applications in 1994: USC. I was accepted, but chose the UO, because it had everything I wanted and needed (namely, French, Russian – which I also studied there – music, and a growing presence on the internet). Our School of Music lab had powerful Macs due to the need to run composition software. They were connected to the T1 network. I designed my personal webpage in 1994 (http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~astev hehe) and on seeing it, our tech guy asked if I wouldn't mind designing a site for the School of Music. A graphics designer friend and I got to it. I did the HTML and content, he did the layouts and images. That very same year, we had our first application request by email. Woohoo! That applicant was accepted, and we three still remember the giddy sensation of meeting In Real Life. "You're the people who designed the WEBSITE! WOW!!!" 8-)
Meanwhile I'd met a guy online – you've never heard this part of the story before. My first French boyfriend? Was a Lyonnais I'd chatted with on IRC for three years. Just so happened my university French program had an exchange program in Lyon.
After my year in Lyon, in which I finished my BA and he his degree in IT management, we went to Finland. Could the world get any smaller? My .edu account was closed, but that was okay because I had a Finnish one with an ISDN connection. This was 1998-2000. We too thought ISDN would be revolutionary.
When we went back to France in 2000, ADSL had arrived. I worked online as a translator. Got loads of work through my website. Fast-forward six years, and I was hired by my favorite client IT consultancy – one I'd also met online. The job was IRL :) Ten years later! I'm still there, thought not for much longer. Found a new job through real, live networking.
Sitting here typing this story on a forum using the Internet, as I have since age 14.
I've never forgotten the original idealism of the 'net. Bringing people together. It is the story of my life. I'll always see it that way. Corporations may and do futz it up, but people still find ways to connect.
posted by fraula at 1:57 AM on January 10, 2017 [5 favorites]
I wonder now if students even use the provided on-campus phone jacks, with the ridiculous long-distance plan that came with them.
Heck, even in 2001 a lot of students (myself included) were using cell phones instead of the phone jacks. I recall that it was actually cheaper, provided you stayed below a certain fairly achievable number of minutes.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:30 AM on January 10, 2017
Heck, even in 2001 a lot of students (myself included) were using cell phones instead of the phone jacks. I recall that it was actually cheaper, provided you stayed below a certain fairly achievable number of minutes.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:30 AM on January 10, 2017
Undergraduate 90-95, Masters '97 at one of the larger engineering schools in ontario (Waterloo). In first year the computer labs were almost all IBM PC-XTs with monogreen monitors and those killer keyboards...and a triple wide dot matrix printer that would dump two pages of header and a waste margin wider than the paper you wanted, for every piece of output. Towards the year I graduated, there were laser printers but they were constantly broken and you had to pay by the page after the first 100 pages.
I embraced email internally right away but was appallingly bad at grasping its possibilities:
- didn't learn about dists or listservs for almost 3 years
- learned you could contact someone at another school by adding an @ and some arcane shit after the @...a couple of years in
- was the last person to adopt PINE
- used to scrupulously delete old messages, hahahahhahahah
Late in my final year of undergraduate the newer computers had Mosaic installed. I actually had a paid account to do searches on Infoseek for a brief time...and then I discovered Altavista. One of the main things I remember about the web: I was learning to brew beer at the time, and between usenet and nascent hobby webpages I was directly in touch with a lot of people very quickly who could give me deep advice. That was a wild, wild feeling, vs. e.g. having to rely on the guy at the supply store and stare owlishly at my dogeared copy of Papazian and figure out why my wort had turned green...
Also spent WAAAAAAAAY too much time on MUDs via TELNET when I was in grad school.
posted by hearthpig at 7:40 AM on January 10, 2017 [2 favorites]
I embraced email internally right away but was appallingly bad at grasping its possibilities:
- didn't learn about dists or listservs for almost 3 years
- learned you could contact someone at another school by adding an @ and some arcane shit after the @...a couple of years in
- was the last person to adopt PINE
- used to scrupulously delete old messages, hahahahhahahah
Late in my final year of undergraduate the newer computers had Mosaic installed. I actually had a paid account to do searches on Infoseek for a brief time...and then I discovered Altavista. One of the main things I remember about the web: I was learning to brew beer at the time, and between usenet and nascent hobby webpages I was directly in touch with a lot of people very quickly who could give me deep advice. That was a wild, wild feeling, vs. e.g. having to rely on the guy at the supply store and stare owlishly at my dogeared copy of Papazian and figure out why my wort had turned green...
Also spent WAAAAAAAAY too much time on MUDs via TELNET when I was in grad school.
posted by hearthpig at 7:40 AM on January 10, 2017 [2 favorites]
maxwelton: "I miss suck.com. "
You aren't the only one. But, the demise of Suck.com is kind of what pushed me to look elsewhere for entertainment, and that got me to Metafilter.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:27 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
You aren't the only one. But, the demise of Suck.com is kind of what pushed me to look elsewhere for entertainment, and that got me to Metafilter.
posted by caution live frogs at 11:27 AM on January 10, 2017 [1 favorite]
I had a friend who was very proud of his 5-digit ICQ number.
My roommate and I always got a laugh out of ICQing each other from across the room. Also, I got really good at imitating that "uh-oh!" sound. Huh, I wonder if I can set that as a text message ringtone?
posted by the_blizz at 12:07 PM on January 10, 2017
My roommate and I always got a laugh out of ICQing each other from across the room. Also, I got really good at imitating that "uh-oh!" sound. Huh, I wonder if I can set that as a text message ringtone?
posted by the_blizz at 12:07 PM on January 10, 2017
My roommate and I always got a laugh out of ICQing each other from across the room. Also, I got really good at imitating that "uh-oh!" sound. Huh, I wonder if I can set that as a text message ringtone?
Yes it's freely available. I got mine from Zedge
posted by Jalliah at 12:30 PM on January 10, 2017 [2 favorites]
I wish I could retrieve my old 5-digit Slashdot ID/username. It's attached to an old university email address I can't access anymore and that may in fact no longer exist.
(I met my husband through Slashdot.)
posted by brainwane at 10:16 PM on January 10, 2017
(I met my husband through Slashdot.)
posted by brainwane at 10:16 PM on January 10, 2017
For some reason I just went and logged into Slashdot (with my 5 digit id) a few days ago for the first time in a decade. That was the first place that I used octothorpe as a username.
posted by octothorpe at 4:33 AM on January 11, 2017
posted by octothorpe at 4:33 AM on January 11, 2017
Like a bunch of others I got into computers from hand-me-downs showing up in the basement. I remember as an 8 or 9-year old discovering that the book in the drawer contained the magical keys to make the mysterious machine Do Stuff. (Learning RTFM that early came in handy.)
A few years later I got online with a state-of-the-art 33,600 baud modem (yeah, that ages me). That opened up worlds... and I'm not sure I've emerged from that rabbit hole. For all my complaints about my parents, they were technologically progressive, and that covers - if not a multitude of sins, then some.
In 1999 I started using Linux. If there's one key intellectual revelation from my childhood that I could relive it would probably be that entire experience: learning that the constructs and metaphors through which you interact with the machine were arbitrary, and that some methods of interaction were better than others.
Linux opened up Unix culture as a whole, and I was privileged to engage in some of it before the tyranny of the web was complete and before rampant commercialisation diluted the weirdness of the original Internet to homeopathic levels. There are many fond experiences there. Discovering how accessible the gurus were. Exploring the network via the command line and having the bondage and burden of the GUI forever lifted. Learning there was a Wild West, and that it was populated at times by both miscreants and professors, and that sometimes those were the same individual.
What troubles me is that the next generation won't have that experience, of the mysterious machine and the magical network. Today's paradigms have been refined and confined ad nauseum. The machine now requires so little of the user that the user can take the machine for granted. I mourn the loss of those series of eureka moments, for myself because there's only one Unix culture to encounter and I can't do it again, for those after me because having an Internet is passé and it's just Youtube and Facebook and MMORPGs anyway, right?
posted by iffthen at 4:49 AM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
A few years later I got online with a state-of-the-art 33,600 baud modem (yeah, that ages me). That opened up worlds... and I'm not sure I've emerged from that rabbit hole. For all my complaints about my parents, they were technologically progressive, and that covers - if not a multitude of sins, then some.
In 1999 I started using Linux. If there's one key intellectual revelation from my childhood that I could relive it would probably be that entire experience: learning that the constructs and metaphors through which you interact with the machine were arbitrary, and that some methods of interaction were better than others.
Linux opened up Unix culture as a whole, and I was privileged to engage in some of it before the tyranny of the web was complete and before rampant commercialisation diluted the weirdness of the original Internet to homeopathic levels. There are many fond experiences there. Discovering how accessible the gurus were. Exploring the network via the command line and having the bondage and burden of the GUI forever lifted. Learning there was a Wild West, and that it was populated at times by both miscreants and professors, and that sometimes those were the same individual.
What troubles me is that the next generation won't have that experience, of the mysterious machine and the magical network. Today's paradigms have been refined and confined ad nauseum. The machine now requires so little of the user that the user can take the machine for granted. I mourn the loss of those series of eureka moments, for myself because there's only one Unix culture to encounter and I can't do it again, for those after me because having an Internet is passé and it's just Youtube and Facebook and MMORPGs anyway, right?
posted by iffthen at 4:49 AM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
I started looking around the internet around '92 or '93 in high school. My dad was an engineer who loved having the newest gadgets and built his own computers. It was weird because not a lot of my peers at my school had email accounts so I connected with people across the country.
After spending lots of time on music message boards I made a few friends whom I traded bootlegs with (by mail, of course). We got to know each other, shared our lives in letters, and eventually sent photos. After college I lost touch but that was a weird time in the internet when the "normal" people were getting on there. Around ten years after I had contact with one of my bootleg friends I got an email asking if I was me! It was 2006 and he'd been forwarded my personal website by a friend, thinking he'd like it. Somehow in the description he figured out it was me. Now I'm friends with both him and his wife on Facebook. Maybe we'll meet sometime IRL but, I dunno, it's kind of cool to keep the online relationship alive.
I very much miss some of the things that the internet/constant connectivity have taken away: the freedom to be bored, to get lost, to rely on your own knowledge during conversations... I traveled around the world alone before I owned a mobile phone and was always lost, but always interacting with my environment.
In some ways I think we used to value things more back then—waiting for the VHS tapes of the X-Files and La Femme Nikita from my parents made them a special occasion. Not being in constant contact with friends via text means I had new things to tell them when I saw them. There's so many things like this I could cite, but I guess with all things in life we take the good with bad and find a balance somewhere.
posted by Bunglegirl at 6:03 PM on January 29, 2017
After spending lots of time on music message boards I made a few friends whom I traded bootlegs with (by mail, of course). We got to know each other, shared our lives in letters, and eventually sent photos. After college I lost touch but that was a weird time in the internet when the "normal" people were getting on there. Around ten years after I had contact with one of my bootleg friends I got an email asking if I was me! It was 2006 and he'd been forwarded my personal website by a friend, thinking he'd like it. Somehow in the description he figured out it was me. Now I'm friends with both him and his wife on Facebook. Maybe we'll meet sometime IRL but, I dunno, it's kind of cool to keep the online relationship alive.
I very much miss some of the things that the internet/constant connectivity have taken away: the freedom to be bored, to get lost, to rely on your own knowledge during conversations... I traveled around the world alone before I owned a mobile phone and was always lost, but always interacting with my environment.
In some ways I think we used to value things more back then—waiting for the VHS tapes of the X-Files and La Femme Nikita from my parents made them a special occasion. Not being in constant contact with friends via text means I had new things to tell them when I saw them. There's so many things like this I could cite, but I guess with all things in life we take the good with bad and find a balance somewhere.
posted by Bunglegirl at 6:03 PM on January 29, 2017
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posted by gorgor_balabala at 8:41 AM on January 9, 2017