It’s a lazy Sunday. The weather is gray. We’ve had breakfast and now my wife reads a magazine and I’m sitting at the laptop, the taste of coffee still around me. I should drink some water.
The other day I saw this post by @szczezuja about their first experiences online:
So I was using internet search engines like Altavista, which had some algorithm improvement in comparison to ordinary webpages indexes. But the most of interesting addresses I had been finding in paper (sic!) computers magazines, what sounds crazy today. – How you were using the Internet in the 1991-1995 and 1995-2005?
How you were using the Internet in the 1991-1995 and 1995-2005?
We were living in Bangkok from 1989 to 1991 and I had received a 2400 baud modem from a guy my father knew at the office. With it, I dialed myself into a few local bulleting board systems (BBS). They all had local forums, and door games. These systems had themselves modems that were connected to telephone lines, so they could only serve as many people as there were modems. Many of them had just one. So each BBS could only serve one visitor at a time. I remember waiting an hour or two until the line was free and I could connect.
At one point I realized that you could send mail to people on a different BBS using Fido Net, because one or two of these sites got connected. Since I didn’t know anybody elsewhere, it was simply a theoretical thing. The idea of messages getting transmitted up and down the backbones was fascinating, however.
I remember there being a BBS run by Alan Dawson and John DeVries, and they had written an anti-virus program that made checksums of important parts of your MS DOS system and saved it, and checked the on reruns. I thought it was fantastic. And then I heard that had a feed from an anti-virus group on something called Usenet. This Usenet thing seemed to be a mythical bulleting board of all bulleting boards and I wanted to know more. But I wasn’t into anti-virus software, and all I knew was that in the USA there were other groups on other topics, and I had no access.
When we came back to Switzerland, I called a local BBS of a company I did not know using my good old 2400 baud modem, left a message, and never got a reply.
I took me a while until I finally did get access. When I went to university in 1994 I heard that the zoology lab had an IT administrator who handed out email accounts. So I went and talked to him. He was a friendly guy with short grey hair called Eric, and so I got my first email address: alex@zool.unizh.ch. I learned about the “Rechenzentrum” cellar at the university, with one room full of Macs, one room full of PCs, and one room full of terminals connected to the AIX. I logged in and… I don’t remember much. There was a young dude there telling me a thing or two. How to use finger.
I think I learned about the tools available from welcome messages and local help menus. I suspect it was all Gopher, back then. Somehow I learned about Elm, the mail client. I think the default editor at the time was vi. It was terrible and I didn’t know how to quit. So I used the other one, Emacs. There was also Usenet, using tin! But I quickly discovered that Emacs had a mail client integrated called RMAIL, and a Usenet client called Gnus, which also read mail! Oh… I was hooked!
It was there that I learned about the Play By E-Mail (PBEM) game Atlantis, and when I learned about the DOS port of GCC called DJGPP, and the DOS port of Emacs, I started thinking about translating Atlantis to German (resulting in “German Atlantis”). I collected mail-in orders at the university, saved them to a floppy, ran the game turn at home, generated a huge mail script, saved the results to a floppy, brought it back to the university, and ran the script.
I remember at one point the script had a bug, so I fixed it and ran it again, but it still didn’t work, so I fixed it again, and ran it again, and then the mail server went down because I had filled it up. Oops!
Around this time, Mosaic showed up. Inline images! X11! I was programming a little robot in C using Emacs and GCC, and I was processing data using Perl and generating graphs using gnuplot. All the information was offline. Manuals were offline. There was AltaVista, and later Google. So much better! But my online life was Usenet: gnu.emacs.help and friends were my newsgroups. I got myself a GeoCities website because it was free. I uploaded files using ftp. I used it for my German Atlantis game.
A bit later I discovered the Portland Pattern Repository, Wiki Wiki, the first wiki. And then I discovered Meatball Wiki, which talked about Wiki. I wanted to host an Emacs Wiki. Something between the newsgroups and the FAQ, something collaborative. Thomas Waldmann, author of Moin Moin Wiki and later of Borg Backup, hosted Emacs Wiki for many years.
For a while, my homepage was simple emacswiki.org/alex – but I did finally get my own domain, thinking that I might end up handing Emacs Wiki to somebody else one day. Better separate the two while there was no pressure.
During those wiki days, blogs started to appear and we laughed them off. Blogs, with chronological sorting, were clearly inferior to wikis for knowledge repositories. Little did we know that not many people cared about that. What people cared about would end up on Wikipedia and Fanpedias, and for everything else people would use blogs, and later social media with “walls” and “micro-blogging”. Oh well. Time structured is simply how we live our life, forward in time. Nobody cares for the Wiki Now. Net even me. I rarely go back to update old pages. There too many of them!
In 2006 I returned to role-playing games (RPG) and discovered that there were forums all over the web. Using the web for a forum was like Usenet, but being forced to use an inferior UI that you downloaded every time instead of the fantastic tool at my fingertips: Emacs. Oh my! I never quite got used to forums. I guess I was most active on EN World during the D&D 3.5 days.
Anway, that’s my early Internet story, for @szczezuja.
#Life #Internet #News #UUCP #NNCP #Wikis
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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I really wanted to find more stuff about the Bangkok scene. What was the antivirus software called that Dawson and DeVries were selling? What were the names of these early BBS? One of them was Marc … something. The other one was a Thai fellow with a name starting with V … I think. Aaaagh. So much stuff is missing. I even wrote an article for the Bangkok Post as a teenager. I think Adam Dawson told me to use XyWrite to do it, and I did. My first weird text editor!
– Alex 2021-11-14 19:12 UTC
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Now I’m wondering about using NNCP and getting a Usenet feed.
This document is primarily intended to let you operate as a leaf node for news.quux.org, the Usenet transit server operated principally by John Goerzen. news.quux.org has several peers with which it exchanges Usenet articles, and is able to offer you a full (basically every non-binary newsgroup) or partial (the newsgroups you select) feed. – Obtaining Usenet via NNCP
I’ve seen @jgoerzen post about it on the Fediverse. Temptation!
– Alex 2021-11-14 19:15 UTC
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I still remember POST and PUT. I still remember the Amaya web browser and web editor. Big tech built browsers that you couldn’t use to edit pages, and servers that you could not edit via the browser. You needed shell accounts or ftp.
Incidentally, I see similar forces at work in Gemini: lack of interest in specifying how content gets on to the server; lack of clients that have have editing built in, lack of documentation. Barriers to entry all around, invisible to those who are already there.
– Alex 2021-11-15 10:04 UTC
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From the HTTP/1.1 RFC 2616:
The PUT method requests that the enclosed entity be stored under the supplied Request-URI. If the Request-URI refers to an already existing resource, the enclosed entity SHOULD be considered as a modified version of the one residing on the origin server. If the Request-URI does not point to an existing resource, and that URI is capable of being defined as a new resource by the requesting user agent, the origin server can create the resource with that URI. If a new resource is created, the origin server MUST inform the user agent via the 201 (Created) response. If an existing resource is modified, either the 200 (OK) or 204 (No Content) response codes SHOULD be sent to indicate successful completion of the request. If the resource could not be created or modified with the Request-URI, an appropriate error response SHOULD be given that reflects the nature of the problem. – 9.6 PUT
– Alex 2021-11-15 11:21 UTC
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@jgoerzen wrote a blog post:
I figure it’s time to write a bit about living through the PC and Internet revolution where I did: outside a tiny town in rural Kansas. And, as I’ve been back in that same area for the past 15 years, I reflect some on the challenges that continue to play out. – The PC & Internet Revolution in Rural America
The PC & Internet Revolution in Rural America
– Alex 2022-08-30 12:54 UTC