💾 Archived View for ja2.one › gemlog › 20221115-myinternetpast.gmi captured on 2023-09-28 at 15:31:24. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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@szczezuja@mastodon.online said something like:
If you were using Gopher, please look at (the following link) and describe your Gopher/Internet activities then.
How you were using the Internet
This is not entirely a story about the Internet.
My online activities, like many nerds of the 1980s, began in a world before the Internet as we know it today. Before even America Online, Prodigy or CompuServe existed. In fact, even Quantum Link would be in the future for me as a kid with a 1200 baud modem and a dot matrix printout of local BBS phone numbers.
Before I go on, I know some of you old timers worked with acoustic couplers and 300bps or worse devices and could literally type faster than data could move characters over the line. Well, buddy, write your own story. This one is mine :)
It was in the mid to late 80s when I sat in front of my first Commodore 64. Prior to that, we had a TI-99/4a, for which I am still nostalgic, but those were the dark ages and not particularly important here. We subscribed to Compute! Gazette magazine, and I labored for many hours transcribing BASIC programs from magazine pages into the c64 and saving to tape.
For my troubles, I got to play a few pretty interesting games, though the best ones in that era came from disk and tape swaps with the local Commodore Users Group. One day, we got a 1200bps modem from a fella who had upgraded to a 2400bps unit when they were new, and I don't think I've typed in a magazine program since.
Armed with a list of local BBSs, I began an online journey that would have a massive influence on the adult I have grown to be. Several hours a day, when I was not in school or otherwise being dragged around to something else, I would dial into any one of a dozen or two systems to use up my time allotment.
See, in those days, connections were limited to the number of phone lines the SysOp wanted to pay for, so they typically limited sessions to anywhere from half an hour to a couple of hours. If you wanted to spend a long time BBSing - playing games, reading text file magazines, posting in forums... you had to explore many options.
During these years, all my computing activity was limited to the c64 and toward the very end, some Amiga 500 stuff... but mainly the c64 even after the Amiga entered the picture. I played with Kermit and X-Y-Z Modem stuff, the sorts of protocols one would use to grab 'zines from BBSs and the odd piece of software here or there. Mostly though, I chose to spend my time battling wits with edgy teens on pirate BBSs and playing door games, like Tradewars 2002 and Land of Devestation. That kind of thing.
It was toward the very tail end of this period that my main BBS, The Ministry of Knowledge, started offering BSD (I think) shell accounts and Internet email through a UUCP feed they received using Chowdanet (or IDS?) as an upstream provider. I don't know much of the technical details, this was before I really paid attention to that kind of thing.
That's where I got my first ever email address - jaq@tmok.com (RIP) - which I used for some time, all the way through college as a personal address. This was also my first legit web page - http://tmok.com/~jaq (RIP) - and where I began to learn HTML. TMoK does still to this day host a handful of user pages, and will forward that email if I contact Daver...
In 1993, I met a buddy who had a PC clone. This was my first introduction to MS-DOS and Windows. He lived right behind a library which had an enclosed glass room with a half dozen PCs, and they were just starting to network their card libraries with other locals in the system.
I took great advantage of that library PC lab, mostly to clandestinely install and play the original SimCity for hours a day until they kicked me out. Nobody in the building knew anything about computers, and they had the admin passwords for the card catalog written underneath the keyboards. I had great fun poking around the wider area library system in an unrestricted fashion.
For example, with proper access you could transfer books from other libraries without interacting with the librarians. You could also dial and login to the library network with the phone number that was also written under the keyboard. This occasionally came in handy for looking up books from home, since these were not Internet connected systems at this time.
I have some vague recollections of using Mosaic and Netscape around this time at the library. The Internet was not nearly the tool for the public at that time as it is today, and the available sites were so limited that BBSs were still a much more interesting option for the social nerd.
Things REALLY GOT INTERESTING if you were a geek around this time! Glory days! I can't say I'd ever want to go back in time, but I remember with great fondness many of the innovations that seemed to come every day (and haven't stopped since) during this time.
My major at school was Music Education. Ultimately I changed my major and graduated with a dual major in Music (vocal performance) and Theatre, which I normally truncate to "Musical Theatre" on resumes and in conversation. However, my work study was in IT support.
Mainly I provided the usual IT services around campus. Tending to labs, imaging fleets of machines, helping professors connect to the network when things broke. On the side, I made a good amount of money in the beginning of each year offering to hook up students' computers to their dorm network for $50 a pop. That's a lot of beer money.
This was where I gained a decent level of competency at tech support and basic networking. I also started tinkering with Slackware Linux in the office while my co-workers watched movies... and this is ultimately what got me fired from that work study.
The senior tech, Brian, decided that my learning Linux, setting up webmail services on my own hardware during downtime, was a poor use of resources as compared to the other techs saturating the lab T1 pirating Pixar films. He still works the same job at the same college. I guess he really likes pounding on undergrads.
Back at the dorms, I still connected to BBSs, though you could telnet to them by now and this was nothing for a T1. We used Napster and all the software and protocols that would follow it to download music. Downloading movies was not really a popular thing at this time because nobody had that kind of storage.
Many protocols and essential networking technologies from that time survive today, even if they are being used far outside the original scope and vision. I won't discuss any hardcore networking stuff since it wouldn't be a compelling casual read and it's definitely not in my wheelhouse, but I will mention a couple of highlights from the perspective of end user experience. If you are reading this, on gemini, these things are probably familiar to you...
IRC, Usenet, BitTorrent, and to a lesser degree libpurple, sure continue to offer a lot of value in 2022 and show no signs of stopping.
During this time, I was a professional touring children's theatre actor and music director, and then a retail purveyor of musical instruments. Most of my computing was casual. I tried to do some fun things with battlestations. I obsessively played a lot of a MUD and became involved with a gaming convention (UberCon) as a LAN admin. I traveled to Origins at one point to deliver a LAN for them...
In 2011, it became clear that the only way I would be able to finance interesting toys, a fruitful relationship (read: one involving children) and a home would be to leverage my foundational tech expertise and the fact that I've been a Linux guy since the 90s.
A friend from the MUD I played got me a position as a 3rd shift NOC engineer with an ISP / hosting / colo provider, which I parlayed eventually into a Senior Linux Engineer position working primarily with Red Hat and derivatives. I began playing with Debian and Ubuntu, and eventually threw Windows out the window for Linux full time.
When I learned about Arch (I use Arch btw), I ran that full time for a couple of years before discovering Manjaro which is currently my distro of choice. I've used a bunch of DEs as well, from KDE to Gnome to Openbox to i3/sway, back to Gnome and full circle back to KDE Plasma again, and that's where I remain today.
Leaving the employer who set me on the pro Linux road, I got on board with a major FOSS company. For a while I did some kubernetes consulting, and now I work with partners on embedded kubernetes solutions. I deploy microservices at home for fun, but my small scale stuff is more docker / portainer oriented. Mostly, it's media services supporting a plex ecosystem and some VPN / DNS stuff.
So, Szczeżuja, I'm not 100% sure this answered your initial question in exactly the way you meant it or if I included far too much tangentially related detail for a casual read. Either way, I promised you an answer, and here it is.
It's entirely likely I'll go back and add / remove / revise this entry as I'm a fan of continuous integration and continuous deployment, so anyone reading this a week from the datestamp is probably reading an evolution of the original gemlog. That's okay with me.
It should be ok with you too. :)