Nobody Cares: Technology-only Edition

[Khamon]

Did school mainframe messaging qualify as online chat if the messages were typed and read over a modem?

SEND 'Is your reverse bubble sort working?' USER(lynch) LOGON

 

[Free]

Old people are so desperate to be hip...

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

Usenet, UUCP mail, and bang paths. Chat was local-system only with talk and write. I used a dial-up chatline for a while that was eventually networked to multiple nodes, all in the same calling area though. Then Relay and IRC.

My first bang path was at least three hops from the nearest well-known host. Then I got a connection only two hops from uunet.

Every time I share something about the old old internet days it seems you're able to chime in with first-hand experience, and that's always really cool to see, but it also kind of makes me sad. Because this stuff is all just things I'm reading about in websites or videos about history, it's all before my time, and -I- just really really dislike the present internet and kinda hate where it's going; but for someone like you who's been watching this all happening since the very beginning...I feel like you HAVE to be in pain when you see the way things have turned out. Like actual physical pain.

Are you? Or is that just me projecting? Is it really not that bad to you, or maybe you're still hopeful it can get good again, or you're actually grateful it's not worse? What do you see when you're online now?

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Old people are so desperate to be hip...

Yes, we are.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Yes, we are.

She meant hip replacement.

 

[Ellie]

I'm the hip smoking replacement gmah of my huge extended family.

Smoking's huge among local teens & alternatives are easy to find. Just some aren't as good an alternative as others, especially disposables, for many reasons.

I advise all the younger family members about the safest products & liquids, plus refer concerned parents to former ASH director, Clive Bates, the patron saint of vaping.

Home - The Counterfactual

I don't encourage teens to vape, but if they insist, or smoke and express concern about that & a wish to switch to (95% less harmful) vapes, I make sure they use the safest possible ones.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. The new windows update broke my chrome ad blocker. I had to disable it to get stuff to work. I don't feel like setting up new tools, lol.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I feel like you HAVE to be in pain when you see the way things have turned out. Like actual physical pain.

I've been kind of numb since September 1993 when AoL got a Usenet feed.

A lot of things are better, Second Life is kind of the first step to the network Vinge wrote about in True Names in the early '80s. Kind of salty about the way virtually every else doing 3d environments keep missing the point.

I could absolutely do without spicy autocomplete though.

 

[Knutz Scorpio]

For a while I enjoyed autocomplete, only had to type 'vir' to end up here. But when it assumes whole words and even phrases to add to my search it's like that annoying twit that takes pleasure in twisting everything you say. STOP THAT!!

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Usenet, UUCP mail, and bang paths. Chat was local-system only with talk and write. I used a dial-up chatline for a while that was eventually networked to multiple nodes, all in the same calling area though. Then Relay and IRC.

My first bang path was at least three hops from the nearest well-known host. Then I got a connection only two hops from uunet.

Yup, I do remember the old days... with Taylor UUCP, CNews and S-Mail on my local site. MUA was elm or pine, newsreader was tin. CNews took ages to write to disk, but it worked.

 

[Noodles]

Old people are so desperate to be hip...

SEND 'ORDER CORN' USER(facebook) LOGON

 

[Free]

SEND 'ORDER CORN' USER(facebook) LOGON

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

I've been kind of numb since September 1993 when AoL got a Usenet feed.

Endless September was before my time on the Internet. I first read USENET via dejanews, while looking for info on a topic at the computer lab of the local community college building. They let the public use their computers, if some were free.

I first got posting access to USENET via WebTV, which had pretty full USENET access. It worked just like WebTV e-mail. The default colors, green text on dark gray background, made it look like a terminal application. WebTV had IRC access too, but since everyting on a WebTV box is essentially a web page/form, WebTV users couldn't do certain IRC commands and couldn't make use of chanop status. Again, green text.

Looked like this:



When I started using Linux in 2002, my ISP offered USENET, they stopped some years back..2016 or so. CC sadface.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

WebTV

OMG I THOUGHT I HAD RECYCLED THOSE UNHAPPY NEURONS ALREADY

 

[Free]

Ah, WebTV.

My first "professional" technical support job was for a company that partnered with them to provide dial-up (DIAL-UP! REMEMBER THAT?) internet access to their customers. We got a demo of the product and someone asked ""But, who would want to surf the internet on their TV?" Millions, it turned out.

 

[Essence Lumin]

newsreader was tin.

I loved nn.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

What have I done

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I loved nn.

rn/trn here

Barry Shein used to claim he discovered Usenet when he accidentally typed "rn somefilename" instead of "rm somefilename".

 

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

I loved nn.

nn isn't available in the Fedora repos, but tin, slrn and mutt are.

What have I done

Encouraged the "nerds ancien" to post their memories?

These were before my time, but I know about them from reading books about the early internet pre 1995 my library had:

gopher://gopher.floodgap.com

That will only work if your browser has gopher support, which it most likely won't, unless you have OverbiteNX+Onyx or OverbiteWX installed or are using Lynx.

Use the http proxy instead: Public Gopher Proxy @ Floodgap.com: Access Gopher Sites from Your Browser

Web based interface to a working archie server:

Archie www interface

And if you want to get the experience of accessing the internet via a shell account:

ssh://ssh.sdf.org

ssh://new.sdf.org to create an account.

You can also telnet in, but don't do that, use Putty as your ssh client.

Download PuTTY - a free SSH and telnet client for Windows

Or ssh is probably available via the Ubuntu subsystem you can install in Windows.

You can also browse the web like its 1993, but only on non https sites:

Floodgap Mosaic-CK: an unsupported updated port of the NCSA Mosaic web browser

Compiled just fine, once I installed a few devel packages.

https://i.gyazo.com/2e32f2b3983f638e83a526de5e2041dd.png

 

[Free]

What have I done

You triggered an old people nerdgasm.