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<2022-08-13>
A reply to:
... sort of.
It is one of my conceits that I was both too old and too young to get much involved with computers in the 1980s. It seems to me that the folks who did get involved were either:
a. At least 10 years older than me, settled professionals with disposable income and a place to put the hulking behemoths that were desktop computers back then, or
b. The children of same, who used their parents computers to play games, or maybe even were given their own C64 or something when their parents got tired of kicking them off the 'family' computer.
But I was a poor university student or otherwise underemployed for most of the 80s, and I moved around a lot. So owning a computer never seemed really practical to me.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, the 1980s would have been a really exciting time to have been a computer hobbyist, and I'm kind of sorry I missed out. I might not have been so under-employed, either, if I'd developed some real computer skills back then. On the other hand, the 80s was the last time in my lifetime that you could be a relatively normal, middle class Canadian, not own a computer or suchlike device, and it wasn't weird. Given the amount of time I've spent staring into monitors in the decades since, maybe it's just as well I spent the first decade of my adult life mostly computer-free. (I say mostly because I did use computers at work, but for very rote tasks like checking out books with punch cards, when I worked at a university library).
Anyhow, in terms of computer networking - dialup, bbses, the internet - the 80s were a total writeoff for me. I /think/ my earliest exposure to the internet was on a public computer terminal in the library at the University of British Columbia (UBC), when I selected an option to look up books in the University of Alberta library catalogue, saw I was getting real time information on whether books were checked out, and thought "what sorcery is this?" That would have been in the very early 90s.
I didn't get 'on the net' until 1994, when I started a masters degree in Library and Information Studies, also at UBC. Suddenly I had email, a small storage allocation (like 4 MB, or something) in the Library School computer lab, access to the Mosaic web browser, and telnet access to the University's central computing services, where I used Pine to check my email, and something else (tin maybe?) to read the newsgroups. I do recall using gopher to access other university libraries. Lots of libraries ran gopher sites, that mostly (as I recall) acted as gateways to their library catalogues, which you could access via telnet.
By the time I graduated in '96 those gopher sites were fast dying out, replaced (of course) by web sites that looked and worked pretty much the same. I had acquired my first computer by then, a second-hand Panasonic 386 laptop, that ran MS-DOS. I soon upgraded to a 486 running Windows 3.1, and then again to a Pentium running Windows 95, that I eventually set up to dual-boot into Red Hat Linux 3. I learned a lot from doing that, and was inordinately proud of myself for pulling it off. (To be fair, that was in the days when you could blow up your monitor if you got the video settings wrong, so probably some pride was warranted).
My time in Library school happened right at the end of the great 'information utility' era, where searching commercial research databases like DIALOG and LEXIS/NEXIS cost real money, charging by connect time and number of results returned. So it made economic sense to have a trained Librarian run the searches rather than letting just any researcher bash away to see what they could turn up. One of my courses was all about efficient search strategies to extract the maximum relevant information in the minimum amount of time. There were fairly complex query languages you could use to really hone in on specific topics, and different databases used different ones. I quite enjoyed that course and it turned out I was pretty good at it. Unfortunately I never actually got to use those skills for real; but the time I was in the workforce the economics pointed entirely in the opposite direction: network costs were way down, research databases were licensed through annual "all you can eat" subscription fees, and the web made it easy for anyone to run searches in a simple GUI, rather than typing arcane commands at a terminal.
By the latter part of the 90s I was working for a small government office that coordinated various online information services for post-secondary libraries all across our fair province. One big change in Library-land in those years was the migration of text-based, telnet services to the web. Another even bigger change was the addition of full text to research databases. Even into the late 90s, most library research databases just gave you citations for articles, which you would then have to go find physical copies of. Needless to say, having the full text online was a real game-changer, and fundamentally changed the nature of academic libraries in ways that are still playing out a generation later.
Thanks to Szczeżuja for asking the question! Answering was, for me at least, a fun stroll down memory lane.
The Internet in the 1990s, and me was published on 2022-08-13