this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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The birth of the internet, it was not easy getting on the internet back in the day.
There was a very high technical bar to get everything working, everyone was actually really cool, supportive, and generally nice.
Even getting the parts for a computer to work right was an ordeal. You could spend months researching parts and power supplies and cases then it only beeps or whirs when you try to boot.
Not to mention installing Windows required boot floppies before you could put in the install CD. Remember Win95/Win98 bootdisks we kept in our backpacks for emergencies?
Remember borrowing time on the mainframe or programming on a punch card (granted, I was in Junior high when I did that)?
"install CD'
Oh, my sweet summer child ...
Wait until they hear about the install case sets of 5.25" floppies.
And then going home and praying it didn't stall overnight.
When hacking write protect involved Scotch tape.
But why does DOS 3 need more than one 5.25" disk? Too much bloat if you ask me!
Yeah I've been thinking about just getting a CD drive on my desktop installed because it just feels weird not having one
I bought my first laptop that doesn't have an optical drive last fall. I haven't missed it...yet.
It also doesn't have an ethernet port, so I bought a usb ethernet adapter for it. I'm not ready to let go of that. (And I often find myself diagnosing network issues, so I do need it occasionally.)
I live in an ETHERNET ONLY HOUSEHOLD
(Also wireless still sucks for gigabit)
My college had gopher early on. You could poke a South African college's Goper service a few times to tie it up and it'd drop you to a telnet prompt. where I had an early email address from University of Boulder who were just handing them out to whoever wanted one.
One day, there was a pile of people standing arounda computer in the library. Some admin installed mosaic on one of the library computers and we all sat around watching some people hit super early pages, mostly internet project pages. It was a few years before stuff really started getting interesting.
You aren't kidding. My city was really slow on the Internet so i was using aol. Asking for certs and using CC generators. It was good times actually.
Then I tried IRC and kept getting kicked from every channel and someone finally gave a reason before before kicking me. When i messaged them explaining how i have no other way to access the internet they were actually really cool and invited me back to the channel. I didn't go back as I knew i carried an unacceptable tag.
A year or 2 later we finally got a provider and oh wow now i remember trumpet windsock and the chaos of trying to find anything.
I still remember seeing a Toyota commercial with a web address and being like wow this internet thing is really taking off!
Now we've come full circle and i have to argue with my parents about the "truth" on Facebook. It's got its perks but terminals and desqview times make me miss the simplicity.. or complication. Depends how you look at it .
Oh god I erased winsock from my memory! Our little local ISP had spotty access with weird tools and I also moved to AOL haha.
AOL was a blast at the time. Warez and MFT rooms could fill an inbox with every piece of software you wanted to play with. How about what you could do with LuciferX? Hah
As for winsock, same here. It's funny how a random post can unearth memories like that. Just one of many reasons I've come to enjoy the fediverse. Makes me feel like I should be using Netscape
Pull up a chair son, I'll tell you a tale of Trumpet Winsock.
Oh fuck. Totally forgot about that! Think I blocked out how bad it was to connect in Win3.1...but those sweet mIRC windows were worth it.
That was before my time, but my early schooling still had some marks from that era. Instead of giving links, we were taught to type out the entire URL. HTTPS and all. I didn't understand why at the time, but it makes perfect sense. You really didn't want to have a single wrong letter sometimes. Legally.
Oh there was no one looking at what anyone was doing it was truly the wild west!
At my high school, we installed doom on all the school computers and used to play deathmatch games in computer class.
I can still vividly remember the sounds of the modem connecting