goon's Journal: 10 years on the Internet

10 years on the Internet

• • At the time I was working with a bunch of psychopaths - running around in boiler suits, heavy boots and lugging 50Kg loads in dangerous environments. Taking orders off idiots, having to ask permission to take a drink - but not doing what you are probably thinking. Certainly not enjoying the experience. I had to get out. I was hungry for something and somewhere else to work :)

  Not long ago I noted the 10 year anniversary of the first web page. Well this year marks my 10th year on the Internet. 10 years ago this month, January or February some time, I forget.

  • "... When is not import. Where is ..."

  I had just enrolled to do some some post grad studies. It was at a place of learning that I stumbled into the Internet.

Early Internet - what information can I find?

• I had to get out of the current job I was in. Doing some extra studies was a good way learn more about computing and software development. The first thing I noticed about the computer centre was the crapy Windows 3.1 machines. Remember this was before the rah rah rah of Windows '95 understanding networking, browsers and IP stack (Trumpet filled this gap). Microsoft had yet to realise the importance of the Internet. Some say they still don't. It took me about one afternoon.

  • "... The biggest change was networking ... We had unlimited access to the web through our student accounts ..."

  Things had changed a bit from my undergraduate years. Gone where the mainframes, punch cards, deck writers. It was light years away from doing mainframe (similiar to this one) , batch card (info for purposes of understanding how batch works only) processing in Fortran, editing mainframe text files in Ed and writing desktop GIS graphical and console applications in pascal during undergrad.

  The biggest change was networking. The computer centre consisted of banks of networked, generic PC's via Banyan Vines to the *nix mainframes hidden deep in the bowels of applied science building. I went there once, to get a new password and was acknowledged by the cliched bearded systems admin who emerged only from their glass-bowled data centre, to quickly read out my 16 digit hashed password. We had unlimited access to the web through our student account.

  Getting onto the Internet involved a choice of CLI or graphical applications. Graphical Internet access was available through a client program called Cello an early browser interface. Mosaic had yet to be installed - had it been released? (yeah by about 2 yrs). I remember spending a bit of time working out how to search with a web search engine, and it's less successful predecessor, gopher and landing in a place called doomgate to grab Doom wad files.

First taste of *nix & internet apps

• • "...access through a mainframe Unix shell dialup account gave me my first real taste of *nix ..."

  Home access through a mainframe Unix dialup shell account gave me my first real taste of *nix. Ftp for downloads, Pine for email, Lynx for internet, vi for editing and c for programming applications.

  I think there was about 50K machines on the Internet by this time. The information space was huge and more importantly, growing exponentially.

  It would a be almost a year and a bit before I started at my first computing job at sausage. But by the end of the first day playing around on the Internet and Web I knew something big was going on.

*sigh*

[dolo666]

This brings back wonderous memories for me. I can remember my first time online. It was at a place called the Internet Cafe, a small shop running a bunch of systems on a fat pipe, LAN'd together. They had email set up for members, and the coffee was good. The place had a distinct odour to it -- like a freshness that could be bottled or might be due to the newly installed computers... it was sterile.

Anyway, I used to browse around online, surfing for info on the newest sites. I can remember getting info on

Re:*sigh*

[goon]

Anyway, we had to pay to use the cafe computers, but it was cheap! Only about $3/hr CAD. I spent hours there each day, after school... learning about stuff I wanted to know.

Did a lot of AD&D research for campaigns.

Yeah I had to get a new PC [slashdot.org] (obsd install) and a modem to do all that stuff. I logged into Gemsites a while ago, got a uid. Gotta say I'm bit of an early adopter (to use marking speak). Also curious about your php code - just to see what it like. I like the idea of getting a smaller slash