this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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I was born a decade after Netscape navigator was launched. I'm legally an adult. Wow, you're old!
What shall I say? The first browser I ever used was called "Arena" and it ran on a UNIX system because Windows back then didn't even have (native) networking - you had to purchase TCP/IP for it from third parties back then.
And one of the first websites I visited was "the original one" on Tim Barners-Lee's NEXT cube in CERN.
And guess what - there was a network way before the Web. We had chat, "social media" before it was called that, and played online multiplayer games. All without any spam or advertising.
... I still mud. Kind of funny having characters that haven't logged on for 28 years.
Yep. Could be about as long for me. It was crazy back then.
LOL WAT?!! The precursor to the WinRAR subscription, huh...
Wow, this is kinda like witnessing the moon landing live, right? That's amazing!
Interesting... Which chat server was this? And what year approximately?
Well, the TCP/IP stack we had was not at all like WinRar. You bought a box with a bunch of disks (5.25in) and some thick paperback manuals. The price was about 150$, and installation was tricky. It only worked with a certain set of network cards. But it did work together with the other network stack back then: Novell Netware, which did the majority of work in corporate networks back then.
The chat had a bit different structure back then. Messages went from client to client, and the "TALK" server only did coordination. There was a system, IIRC it was called NICKSERV or something where you globally registered your nickname.
I was not only watching things back then. I wrote a number of tools that made the rounds back then, a client for such a multiplayer online game that worked both in a text terminal and with a GUI, and a non-interactive NNTP (USENET) client that allowed access to our equivalent of the fediverse remotely. And I even wrote our companies first SMTP (email) gateway to the internet back then. Not "installed" or "configured" - wrote.
Well, I retire next year so, yeah, I'm that too.