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Created 2022-08-11
Question was posed at:
How you were using the Internet in the 1991-1995?
I was in my late 20's during that era. I did my degree in 1983-86, and had never heard of things like BBSs or gopher. After that I got a job as an accountant, where there was no internet, nor had anyone really heard of it.
In 1991-93 I did a Masters course in mathematics. It was a joint course between two universities. One had Unix machines, so we had Maple, Fortran, and all that good stuff. Back in those days we were innocent about security, and you could send a picture to someone else's machine remotely. I still hadn't heard of the internet.
I had an industrial placement during 1993 in order to write my dissertation for my masters (in UK you do dissertations for masters, and theses for PhDs. In the US they swap terms). I often went into one of the rooms at weekends to download software for my Amiga. I downloaded the software via FTP. I used a graphical client rather than command-line. The sites that ring a bell are Aminet and SUNnet.
I also got a few recipes from somewhere. One was for split pea soup. I still have a derivative of it somewhere, and I occasionally make split pea soup. So split pea soup is indelibly linked in my mind with academia and the early internet.
From late 1993 I started a PhD, also in maths, of course. Most of the students around me used Windows 3.11. Some research assistants had quite expensive workstations. A DEC Alpha was bought for my group, which I could use. It cost £20k. In retrospect, it was way overpriced.
The room I was in also introduced some smaller SGI (Silicon Graphics) machines for general use by PhD students and staff. A fellow PhD student, Tony, used to be on the SGI machines al lot. He often came in weekends. I think it was mostly to browse the web via Mosaic (probably, or maybe it was Netscape).
I think I might have vaguely been aware of gopher, but had no knowledge of BBSs. I think I went to the library a few times to search for books. Maybe there was Veronica on it, but for the most part I didn't think anything of it.
I didn't really think much of anything in terms of the internet during that time. It never really registered in my mind as "a thing" with potential. So I wasn't really thinking about browsing sites.
I do remember there was a thing called "The Oracle", which was an email service. You posted questions to the Oracle, and got a response within a few days. The responses were, of course, written by other participants. One question I asked was the Zen riddle "What is the sound of one hand clapping." I got the response "It's the sound my father makes in the bathroom late at night." Lol.
In the late 90's I worked as a programmer in a small firm. I frequently browsed the internet. Motley Fool UK was my favourite. It is a finance/investment website. It was quite popular at the time, and quite respectable. There were good discussions there. The site has long since degraded into being the opposite of what it originally set out to achieve.
I moved to a large programming consultancy company as the tech boom was reaching its climax in the late 90's. One guy I worked with said that he'd seen the internet a few years earlier and dismissed it as a fad.
I hope you found that interesting.