In the late 1980s I started working with computers for a living, and in relatively short order began to kludge together ways to twist the mini-computer system I managed into a desktop publishing system. (Getting an AT&T; 3B2/400 running UNIX System V to do what you want is a daunting task, especially when it you want it to do something unnatural, and particularly when you taught yourself how to use it and had a fool for a teacher.) But eventually I won out over the machine, and began writing and (irregularly) publishing a ‘zine, something most of my friends thought was an insane waste of effort and money. For me it was a chance to ease my way bacm into creative endeavors after a long absence.
By 1990 the desire to learn more about computers lead me to become active on a couple of local BBS systems. I was thoroughly fascinated by the ability to communicate with people over a computer, and to meet people in the mind before I met them in the flesh. These were the strange days for me, when I was learning so much so fast, faster than my illogical mind could process. But I worked it out, and even today I can remember the weird bits of arcanum, incantations with lost meanings and that retain their power. And along the way I heard about a network that would allow you to send messages from one system to another, removing the limitations inerent in the archipelago of bulletin board systems. It was called the Internet.
The first Internet account I had was back in 1992, a login for Delphi. I used it to visit FTP sites listed in fringe culture glossies and photocopied ‘zines, downloading sound files stolen from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and 2001: a Space Odyssey, or public domain books from Project Guterberg. And every now and then I would venture into the Wild West of USENET.
My Eureka moment on the Internet was in this era. I had just connected to Delphi’s VAX server and gone to an FTP site to download a program to create your own adventure games, and realized the site was in Finland. “Holy shit!” I said to the cat. “It’s 3:00am, I’m sitting in front of a computer in my underwear, and I’m also in Finland. Finland!”
Soon the Delphi account gave way to a shell account with Illuminati Online, and then a second account with Cybergate in Deerfield Beach. (Somewhere in there I was also on Prodigy, but let’s not talk about that.) From rummaging through my e-mail and data archives recently — I am a notorious digital pack-rat — it looks as though I created my first web page on io.com using vi back in 1993, shortly after the introduction of HTML. Those early pages — together with similar efforts on GeoCities and FortuneCity — were collections of ephemera: repurposed essays from my ‘zine, bits of short fiction, and game-related material. I’ve been writing and publishing on-line in various forms ever since.
All of which means I’ve been on-line since the days of USENET, and of Kibo, and of the September that never ended. I remember the controversial introduction of the image tag, and how people screamed that it took too long to load sites that used it. NCSA’s initial public release of Mosaic was amazing; it was the first popular graphical web browser. I remember when the Internet was first and foremost an exchange of ideas (and porn), and the mere suggestion of allowing in commercial enterprise was enough to get you black-listed. I remember the Internet coffeepot, fer chrissakes, and when Archie was the only search engine around. Yeah, verily, I am old in Internet years.
Things haven’t really changed all that much, though. Sure, I guess flame wars have a shorter life cycle than in the newsgroup days, and trolls drop their noxious bait in comments rather than USENET posts. And of course blogging has provided the revolution that the web and HTML promised, giving any schmuck with an opinion the ability to broadcast his ignorance far and wide without learning a line of code. But people and their desires change at a much slower tempo than technology, even at a tipping point like this. I’ll talk about that more in our next installment.
{ 9 comments }
my internet heureka was my first online shopping at cdnow.com in 1994 – it was like a wonderland of music to me (compared to our loser stores over here)!
What, no AOL account? Heresy…
Wow, that was great. Reading your post made me feel like Bobby Newmark being lectured to by the Finn, when he tells him “I’ve got a pair of shoes older than you are.”
I remember being in middle school (’90 or ’91 I think) and reading a column by Bruce Sterling in the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction where he explained this great thing called the internet and went into how it worked and how anyone could become a part of it. I bothered my folks incessantly that we needed to buy a major league computer and get a modem and become part of the internet (at the time, I literally thought that I would become part of the internet infrastructure with a simple modem, like I’d be directing traffic or something). They looked at me like I was crazy.
My mom eventually saw the light in ’93 and we got an account with Cybergate. As a goofy teenager, I thought it was so cool to be associated with anything that had the word Cyber in it. The account was a Unix shell, and I had to muck around with Elm or Pine for the email, and used Lynx for browsing (which at the time made me wonder what the big deal about web pages was all about; we hadn’t installed Netscape yet). I probably made an ass of myself on USENET, and had a grand time experimenting with all the places Telnet could take me to.
Can’t wait for your next installment, this stuff is fucking brilliant.
k.d.: Yes, I had a similar experience with CDNow, too, specifically “Holy shit, they stock the Residents?!”
Gansibele: Actually, I had a free trial on AOL, and used a credit card I was canceling to secure it. I used the free hours (remember when it was hours, not months?), and then dumped it.
Nic: Actually, I thought my Packard Bell PC was a part of the Internet, too. And if you were to Google my original nom du net, you’d find some embarassing USENET posts from me, as well. I’m glad you are enjoying the series.
Great stuff indeed! It is making me think of my first encounter with computers — some term paper freshman year at UM, the computer lab, on a Mac. To think I got through high school using a typewriter! Oh wait, take that back — in high school I used the UM library for AP English, and they were just then transitioning from a paper card catalogue (eek!) to a computerized one. Amazing how far we’ve come!
I love imagining all the awesome stuff I’ll get to say as a true geezer! ["You think your web implant is slow? Quit complaining! When I was your age 24 baud external modems were the pinnacle of technology, you punk!"]
When I was twelve or 13, my dad enrolled me and my (younger) bro in a summer college course in which we learned Basic. My culminating project was an image of a cat’s face which cycled through various colors while playing “Somewhere over the rainbow”. Wonder where that 5 1/4″ floppy is now?
My first encounter with the internet was as a young’un in art school; in a class called “Beyond Traditional Media”, a guy (long-grey-haired-ponytail-guy) made a piece where he projected some usenet or bbs screen captures (of an S/M site); I was underwhelmed. Really, I was thinking, “that thing’s for freaks!”.
And here I am today. GOTO freak.
Yeah, I’m totally going to milk that five-miles-in-the-snow technological equivalent.
KH, I think “GOTO freak” is going to be my new motto.
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Sorry for offtopic