The early days of the internet

Mr. Loverman

Around 1992 I used to go into TCD to play online games ("MUDS") in the computer lab under the train line. I would go there with my older brother, knock on the window, pretend we forgot our swipe card, and go online and play a very primitive text based game called "Endless Nameless". Sometimes a lecturer would come in and ask for my student card, but I would pretend I forgot it. I would say I am a "BESS" student. (Business Economic and Social Studies). I was 14 years old and wearing a tracksuit. They would believe me.

It was incredibly exciting playing this game as I could chat to people in America and England and interact with them.

Fast forward three years later and I have begun a computer science diploma in DIT Kevin Street. On the back of a computer magazine I saw an IBM advert saying they "powered the hyperweb". Curious I went into the computer lab with a college friend, found an application called Netscape and opened the IBM website. It was a thrilling experience. Although the PC was a 386 and slow as hell, I didn't care. Seeing that website load was amazing.

I then discovered webcrawler.com and pornsites. There were only about 150 of them at the time. "Amateurporn.com" was the biggest one at the time. Free porn pictures! Myself and my friend would stay in the computer lab after college spending one or two hours downloading a single image of a naked woman. Ridiculous? Yes, but we were 17 and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was worth it.

We then discovered telnet and shell accounts and how we could join BBS systems around the world. Our favorite was a BBS in Ann Arbor in Michigan. It tooks hours to create your account, but we could go online and talk to Americans. This may sound like nothing now, but you have to remember at the time this type of thing was unheard of, and probably 99% of Irish people had never heard of the Internet.

I remember looking at all the unregistered domain names (hardly any domain names were registered) thinking they were cool domains. It never occurred to me to register one of them.

Back then the Internet was not a commercial place. It was full of people happy to be communicating with other people. But there was money to be made. I remember I used to laugh at all the stupid ideas (e.g. onlyballs.com - we only sell balls! $5 million funding) getting loads of funding. At the time I was a web developer/programmer who had no sense of the real world, so I never once thought I should use my web skills to make some money.

...

Fast forward 16 years later and the Internet is like a strip mall full of tacky ****e. I still love it, but it doesn't thrill me like it used to. I wish it could.

Know what I mean?

fedor.2.

nope

Daegerty

The MUDS are still there if you want them. There's a lot more to the internet than what you see in a web browser

Mr. Loverman

fedor.2. wrote: »

nope

You missed out.

StupidLikeAFox

post the same thinghere and you may find some likeminded indviduals

fedor.2.

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

You missed out.

Looks that way

Skerries

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

Fast forward 16 years later and the Internet is like a strip mall full of tacky ****e. I still love it, but it doesn't thrill me like it used to. I wish it could.

Know what I mean?

well at least the porn has gotten better

ScumLord

Back in my day there were no fancy internets, we played Labyrinth on the BBC micro. We only spook to Americans when they came here on holiday sporting fancy calculator watches.

Gyalist

Dere's more to de internet dan de World Wide Web.

Daegerty

ScumLord wrote: »

Back in my day there were no fancy internets, we played Labyrinth on the BBC micro. We only spook to Americans when they came here on holiday sporting fancy calculator watches.

In my day starting up the computer began with emptying six bags of coal into the furnace and waiting for the steam to bring it to its operating speed of 80Hz

Lex_Diamonds

A lot of what you wrote hit home to me. My first browser was Netscape 1.0 which came bundled with Indigo Ireland's (Ireland's second ISP?) welcome pack. I think this was around '94.

The whole chat thing is what really amazed me the most. There was some graphical chat site called The Palace in which you controlled an avatar moving around different rooms and nattering away to people. Amused me no end at the time!

Screaming at my Mum for picking up the phone and disconnecting me from the net was also a common thing, which is hilarious looking back on it now.

Cathaoirleach

Used to spend all day in Cyberia Café in Temple Bar playing Command and Conquer multiplayer. Happy days. Anyone remember Peter?

Panthro

counterstrike

zagmund

Spent far too much time on the computers in the library in UCD in the early days - around 1988-1992 or so. There were a few macs in a room on the top floor, back left corner. The 'server' was in a little cabinet under the desk. Much fun was had when someone spotted that the cabinet was unlocked. I seem to recall desktop icons being changed -the early days of hacking . . .

The other thing I remember from those days was an application called 'trickle' which you could use to request various files from around the world. You would set up your request (latest copy of BOFH for example), and come back the next day and it would have 'trickled' into your account overnight making use of the off peak capacity. Genius idea in my view - making good use of scarce resources.

I remember as clear as a bell my first introduction to d'webs - two friends who couldn't get a job (now, that was a real recession) stayed on to do some postgrad stuff and they brought me into the lab one day. They downloaded a satellite weather image - I was blown away.

The thing about those days is that they gave you (well, me anyway) a very, very good grounding in the basics of all sorts of IT things and it has stood to me for the last 20 years. Dang, they were the good old days.

z

p.s. also spent a huge amount of time on the terminals in the concourse (before they turned it into a poncy coffee shop), working out early versions of "how to do an awful lot of things with a loop statement" and updating what were known as the scheds - an early version of blogging, but you young folk wouldn't understand . . .

General General

this whole thread belongs on someone's sched.

MagicSean

I remember a site called sexontheinternet. That's pretty much it.

Humans eh!

Yeah TCD under the tracks, I wasn't a student but my girlfriend was. Good times, crazy assed 'Homepages' and long waits for a photo to slowlllly reveal itself.
The net was much more amateurish and not so homogenised as it is now. While infinitely more informative user friendly and vast, todays web is so corporate and much more conformist than the early pioneers could have imagined. Its interesting to see it evolve so much but its lost something of its individuality (and garishness)

Anyhoo thanks for the memories OP. I'm off to unravel the phone extension line across the floor, and load Windows 3.1 on my Wang.

Oh_Noes

Humans eh! wrote: »

Anyhoo thanks for the memories OP. I'm off to unravel the phone extension line across the floor, and load Windows 3.1 on my Wang.

That will make your palms go hairy.

enfant terrible

Gyalist wrote: »

Dere's more to de internet dan de World Wide Web.

Beamish

Mr. Loverman

Gyalist wrote: »

Dere's more to de internet dan de World Wide Web.

Alan Partridge?

Cianos

I remember loads and loads of this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Offy

I remember been addicted to BBS's, then quake was released and I was blown away (no pun intended). At some point porn took over and things were never the same, not better or worse just different.

Offy

Cianos wrote: »

I remember loads and loads of this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

Thats what loading a game on the spectrum sounded like!

Run_to_da_hills

First time having Internet was with Ireland on Line IOL in 1995. Using a US Robotics 12K external modem, dog slow and expensive to use as it was the price of a continuous local call.

Agricola

Wow thats old school, or is that skool.

I started college in 1999 so the pioneering days were well over by then. But even 12 years ago the web was a much more innocent place. Shít Quake, that reminds me! Had a copy of Quake2 going around on a CD-R. Gave it to a bunch of people in my class to copy onto their common drives. Didnt think it would work so easily over the lan, but it did. Spent many a practical class deathmatching. The onboards graphics on the college pc's back then were atrocious but it got the job done. Good times.

Saila

is this thread a nred convention

strokemyclover

Remember finding someone else from the same country as you in a chat forum and chatting to each other like your life depended on it? You didn't want to know each other's opinions on anything really, you were just happy someone else from your country had internet access.

Oh how I miss a few hundred thousand users online

WindSock

Ah yes, Indigo. Back in my day, my first experience with communicae on the internet was in the form of a Radiohead chatroom. All sorts of nerds on there who couldn't take a joke. I believe at the time I may have been engaged in the act of what you kids nowadays call mild trolling.
Mostly Americans but a couple of Irish in there which I thought was mad!!!!

Misty Chaos

I was late to the internet party, so to speak as I only first got online in any shape or form in April 2000, using the Unison Internet on your TV device. I found it too limiting and a few months later, brought a modem for the PC to get the full potential of the Internet for myself.

I remember using iolfree as my service and the dail up sound when connecting. I also remember that downloading a 10mb file was an epic hour long download or not being able to go online if someone was on the phone or not being able to stay on too long owing to the cost of the call.

I also remember designing a website in Microsoft Publisher and uploading it online, its still up there as far as I know but it did set me on the path to taking up Web Design years later and being pretty decent at it.

I was ahead of the curve at the time, talking to Americans regularly and using AIM at a time when pretty much no one else I knew did ( that was the sucky part as it made feel alone ) and this before the advent of social networking.

Fast forward to 2004 and a broadband modem is installed and while I enjoyed the greatly improved speeds, a bit of the magic died as well as it was on and the phone didn't interfere with it anymore. It made downloading MP3s at the time a doodle though.

What do I think of the Internet today? A lot of changed, we a lot more people on it and social networking and streaming video is the norm. Its also normal now to hear about breaking news on the internet first before any other form of media ( examples being for me the death of MJ and the Earthquake in Japan to name a few ) A bit of the innocence is gone but the more things change, the more some things stay the same, if you get my drift.

vampire of kilmainham

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

Around 1992 I used to go into TCD to play online games ("MUDS") in the computer lab under the train line. I would go there with my older brother, knock on the window, pretend we forgot our swipe card, and go online and play a very primitive text based game called "Endless Nameless". Sometimes a lecturer would come in and ask for my student card, but I would pretend I forgot it. I would say I am a "BESS" student. (Business Economic and Social Studies). I was 14 years old and wearing a tracksuit. They would believe me.

It was incredibly exciting playing this game as I could chat to people in America and England and interact with them.

Fast forward three years later and I have begun a computer science diploma in DIT Kevin Street. On the back of a computer magazine I saw an IBM advert saying they "powered the hyperweb". Curious I went into the computer lab with a college friend, found an application called Netscape and opened the IBM website. It was a thrilling experience. Although the PC was a 386 and slow as hell, I didn't care. Seeing that website load was amazing.

I then discovered webcrawler.com and pornsites. There were only about 150 of them at the time. "Amateurporn.com" was the biggest one at the time. Free porn pictures! Myself and my friend would stay in the computer lab after college spending one or two hours downloading a single image of a naked woman. Ridiculous? Yes, but we were 17 and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was worth it.

We then discovered telnet and shell accounts and how we could join BBS systems around the world. Our favorite was a BBS in Ann Arbor in Michigan. It tooks hours to create your account, but we could go online and talk to Americans. This may sound like nothing now, but you have to remember at the time this type of thing was unheard of, and probably 99% of Irish people had never heard of the Internet.

I remember looking at all the unregistered domain names (hardly any domain names were registered) thinking they were cool domains. It never occurred to me to register one of them.

Back then the Internet was not a commercial place. It was full of people happy to be communicating with other people. But there was money to be made. I remember I used to laugh at all the stupid ideas (e.g. onlyballs.com - we only sell balls! $5 million funding) getting loads of funding. At the time I was a web developer/programmer who had no sense of the real world, so I never once thought I should use my web skills to make some money.

...

Fast forward 16 years later and the Internet is like a strip mall full of tacky ****e. I still love it, but it doesn't thrill me like it used to. I wish it could.

Know what I mean?

yep i do hehe:D

Offy

Humans eh! wrote: »

Yeah TCD under the tracks, I wasn't a student but my girlfriend was. Good times, crazy assed 'Homepages' and long waits for a photo to slowlllly reveal itself.
The net was much more amateurish and not so homogenised as it is now. While infinitely more informative user friendly and vast, todays web is so corporate and much more conformist than the early pioneers could have imagined. Its interesting to see it evolve so much but its lost something of its individuality (and garishness)

Anyhoo thanks for the memories OP. I'm off to unravel the phone extension line across the floor, and load Windows 3.1 on my Wang.

3.1? Wasnt it 3.11 that was a network platform? Could you connect with 3.1?

12 element

Yeti

Tea_Bag

12 element wrote: »

Yeti

i lost days of my life to that ski game.

i remember the porn sites, geocities and the like, chatrooms with " real women" :shudder:, and occassionally coming across that god aweful image of a naked lady that had a "loading image" banner over her boobs that you could fall for over and over again (hint: the image was fully loaded, it was early trolling days)

creating miniwebsites and competing with online friends you met in said chatrooms to see who could get the most site views.

then my dad got a 14.4k modem and the internet got sooo much faster.

amacachi

I was fairly late to the net but I think it was when phpBB was just taking off and every asshat around could set up a bulletin board no problem. The amount of homepages I had under different accounts on different hosting sites, Anglfire, Geocities, Freewebz and ton more I can't remember right now.

Twas nice to be able to go online and everyone typed properly and mainly had decent manners. That was a while after the net supposedly went to **** so I'd've loved to have been around before that.

OPENROAD

Got the Net at the end of 1999, remember one chat room site, where you had a multiple of different chat rooms and you could use your microphone to chat, usually ended up like a very very drunk AH without the mods :eek:, or did I dream that seems such a long time ago now, such chat rooms existed, didn't they?

stoneill

so basically it was sh1te then and it's sh1te now.

Pdfile

General General wrote: »

this whole thread belongs on someone's sched.

belongs to me really because as soon as i got onto a crappy atari in like 90/91 from their on in i was hooked !

as time slowly went on i used them more and more and their was no separation of us two...

come to think of it, kids ( my chums ) used to slag me for learning html when i was not much more then knee high, now their asked me for help with their business n' such and wondering why im quoting them stupidly high prices in a recession. :cool:


but really highlight for me was playing half life quake diablo civilizations etc on 56k and complaining about the 10 minute downloads for some stuff for games ( i. 2 pieces of custom jpegs on a map somewhere ) this or windows 98 ( bsod ftw... :mad: )

Ruu_Old

Hotdog colour scheme on Windows 3.1. :cool:

OPENROAD

That dial up tone on indigo was music to the ears, happy days

CorkMan

I remember getting an iMAC OS9 back in 2001. It had 20GB memory. The memory is still very fresh in my mind of walking through my front room door and my Dad and Sister unpacking the packaging of it. Aswell as that my trips to it when 14 years of age I would go onto gamefaqs.com and the WWF website too. I can remember an add-on for Unreal Tournament was released, it was 50MB. I dare not download as it would have taken over 6 hours to get it. (had speeds of 3KB/sec.)

The thing is the dial-up would sometimes switch on and off without me knowing it, so a couple of times we got a bill of 300 euros! How the **** did Eircom get away with that? Crooks the lot of 'em. They should have sent people out to properly install the phone lines when the internet was getting bigger. Though in 2004 BB arrived and it was a lot easier to download video files from websites, like an Eminem video from a fan website. Downloading video/music media definitley became easier.

But then 2006/2007 youtube and social media came, which turned the scene around more. A LOT more. Instead of downloading videos from specific websites youtube is all there is. I don't like to thing what stuff will be like in 10 years time, everything will be so alien it would be like we're on Mars. *shudders*

Rabies

papagormo wrote: »

counterstrike

That's is still fairly new in online gaming.

Go back a few years more

Ponster

Offy wrote: »

3.1? Wasnt it 3.11 that was a network platform? Could you connect with 3.1?

Yep, but only if you had Windows for Workgroups 3.1

3.11 had native 32bit TCP/IP while plain 'ol 3.1 needed an upgrade to add the TCP/IP stack (I think...)

suicide_circus

A/s/l
Wanna cyber?

_sparkie_

a friend of mine had the internet long before i did and i remember his mam giving out to use for using dial-up before 6 cause it went down in prince after then! and cause she couldnt use the phone, how the times have changed!

does anybody else remember a thing called m/dos? it is just sticking out it my mind. we were trying to download games to the computer but this thing called m/dos would never let us, i will never forget you m/dos.

jackiebaron

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

Around 1992 I used to go into TCD to play online games ("MUDS") in the computer lab under the train line. I would go there with my older brother, knock on the window, pretend we forgot our swipe card, and go online and play a very primitive text based game called "Endless Nameless". Sometimes a lecturer would come in and ask for my student card, but I would pretend I forgot it. I would say I am a "BESS" student. (Business Economic and Social Studies). I was 14 years old and wearing a tracksuit. They would believe me.

It was incredibly exciting playing this game as I could chat to people in America and England and interact with them.

Fast forward three years later and I have begun a computer science diploma in DIT Kevin Street. On the back of a computer magazine I saw an IBM advert saying they "powered the hyperweb". Curious I went into the computer lab with a college friend, found an application called Netscape and opened the IBM website. It was a thrilling experience. Although the PC was a 386 and slow as hell, I didn't care. Seeing that website load was amazing.

I then discovered webcrawler.com and pornsites. There were only about 150 of them at the time. "Amateurporn.com" was the biggest one at the time. Free porn pictures! Myself and my friend would stay in the computer lab after college spending one or two hours downloading a single image of a naked woman. Ridiculous? Yes, but we were 17 and didn't see anything wrong with it. It was worth it.

We then discovered telnet and shell accounts and how we could join BBS systems around the world. Our favorite was a BBS in Ann Arbor in Michigan. It tooks hours to create your account, but we could go online and talk to Americans. This may sound like nothing now, but you have to remember at the time this type of thing was unheard of, and probably 99% of Irish people had never heard of the Internet.

I remember looking at all the unregistered domain names (hardly any domain names were registered) thinking they were cool domains. It never occurred to me to register one of them.

Back then the Internet was not a commercial place. It was full of people happy to be communicating with other people. But there was money to be made. I remember I used to laugh at all the stupid ideas (e.g. onlyballs.com - we only sell balls! $5 million funding) getting loads of funding. At the time I was a web developer/programmer who had no sense of the real world, so I never once thought I should use my web skills to make some money.

...

Fast forward 16 years later and the Internet is like a strip mall full of tacky ****e. I still love it, but it doesn't thrill me like it used to. I wish it could.

Know what I mean?

I remember the railway arches. It was full of little Macintosh systems. I got you beaten by a few years. I was on the internet in 1988 on the VAX system in Trinity. Me and a friend would spend hours on the UseNet News site, mostly rec.music.misc emailing and posting to guys in America and Malaysia song lyrics to heavy metal music like Queensryche and Guns n Roses. It was surreal. Also they gave us FTP sites to servers in California where we could download sci-fi stories and pornography. Failed five of my 10 exams that year and had to repeat them because I spent so much time just dilly-dallying on the VAX mainframe. Make me sick when some fool comes up to me in like 1995 and says "Hey, have you ever heard of the internet? You gotta get online man!" Fück off, newbie!

Offy

suicide_circus wrote: »

A/s/l
Wanna cyber?

lol

greenasgrass

I remember playing Prince of Persia on my 286 on christmas morning in maybe 1990 and feeling sick when he fell on the spikes because it sounded and looked so real!!!

I do remember Microsoft Netmeet which was before MSN Messenger. We connected to a guy in Texas and we're all chatting with him. The whole family around the computer. Absolutely ridiculous when I think back on it but we just couldn't get our heads around it in 1993-ish!!

hardCopy

greenasgrass wrote: »

I remember playing Prince of Persia on my 286 on christmas morning in maybe 1990 and feeling sick when he fell on the spikes because it sounded and looked so real!!!

I do remember Microsoft Netmeet which was before MSN Messenger. We connected to a guy in Texas and we're all chatting with him. The whole family around the computer. Absolutely ridiculous when I think back on it but we just couldn't get our heads around it in 1993-ish!!

Prince of Persia, Captain Comic and SimCity, those games were the business (before I got online though).

Anybody remember Colony City? It was like a really primitive version of second life, I must have been on it around 1998/99. At the time the VR graphics looked amazing. I can't belive the site is still up.

I remember getting PC Format back in 1996 and skipping to the recommended websites page, there were so few sites online that I needed recommendations to find aything useful.

phill106

_sparkie_ wrote: »

a friend of mine had the internet long before i did and i remember his mam giving out to use for using dial-up before 6 cause it went down in prince after then! and cause she couldnt use the phone, how the times have changed!

does anybody else remember a thing called m/dos? it is just sticking out it my mind. we were trying to download games to the computer but this thing called m/dos would never let us, i will never forget you m/dos.

msdos you mean? Or are you trolling

boblong

Mr. Loverman wrote: »

Around 1992 I used to go into TCD to play online games ("MUDS") in the computer lab under the train line.

I'm not exactly sure which computer lab you're referring to, but I think I might be in there right now, or at least one of the ones nearby.

Ev84

greenasgrass wrote: »

I remember playing Prince of Persia on my 286 on christmas morning in maybe 1990 and feeling sick when he fell on the spikes because it sounded and looked so real!!!

Yeah, I remember that too... running around in a 2D dungeon looking for green and red potion bottles/jars with my last bit of health, S**ting it jumping through the metal jaw things. "Zak" was another game I vaguely remember. It was a puzzle game where you had to either type what you wanted to do, or pick a task from a list? Funny game.