What's the golden age of online services? Well, now doesn't suck
- Reference: 1702033274
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/12/08/opinion_column/
- Source link:
Many of you were born to the internet. You've always had it, you can no more imagine life without it than you can imagine life without electricity. But believe it or not, the internet you know and love only dates back to 1991 and the [1]Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) . Before CIX arrived, you couldn't get an ISP connection if you were just an ordinary Jane or Joe. Consumer ISPs didn't exist yet. Instead, you got an account on one of the online services such as America Online (AOL), CompuServe, GEnie, Prodigy, The Source, or a local bulletin board system (BBS).
Sure, the internet had already existed since 1980, and I was there. But, unless you were at a university, government agency, or research institution, you probably weren't. Besides, [2]the pre-web internet was about as user-friendly as a bad-tempered Doberman.
[3]
Yes, there were user-friendly programs such as elm and pine for email; [4]gopher for information retrieval, and [5]Archie for hunting down files. But, honestly, they were only user-friendly by Unix programmer standards. Linux? Please! Torvalds was still in middle school.
[6]
[7]
But thanks to [8]1981's Hayes Smartmodem , ordinary people could go online at a shockingly fast 300 bits-per-second (BPS). The online revolution was igniting.
Today, I sit here with my 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fiber connection that is horrifyingly slow. Trust me, though, it was the bee's knees then.
[9]
Mind you, it wasn't cheap. From the '80s through the mid-'90s, you had to use your dial-up modem to call up either a local number or, far more likely, an [10]X.25 packet switched wide area network (WAN) connection to reach these services. This connection alone would cost anywhere from a buck an hour to a wallet-busting $30 per hour. On top of that, the online service would charge you a monthly fee plus an additional fee of $1 to $6 an hour. Oh, and that first Hayes modem? It cost $299.
With "cheap" modems becoming available, it wasn't just large corporations that set up online services. Starting with Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, in 1978, individuals set up PC-based online services: [11]Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) . With it, BBS could connect with each other to make a social network. This would be the model for other online modem BBS networks, such as [12]FidoNet , which survives to this day.
These BBSes created their own networks to store and forward e-mail and online forum messages between BBSes, a process resembling the early Internet's [13]Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) that was used for the same purpose.
[14]
Despite the cost, hundreds of thousands of people went online. The ASCII-based interfaces were crude and ugly. But behind them were the same services we love today, such as email, online forums, and instant messaging (IM).
However, they were far more limited. For instance, unless you were an email expert, you could only write to people on the same service. The same was true of IM. If you think talking between Mastodon instances is hard, you've no idea how difficult it used to be.
In those days, a big selling point was their file libraries. In these halcyon days of freeware and shareware, people would pick a service on the basis of their file library and how much it cost per hour to download them from the online service to your PC.
Oh, and of course, there was pornography - cue the classic [15]"the internet is for porn." But, at 300 BPS, it [16]was made of ASCII characters . It was better than nothing, but that's about all you could say of it.
But the thing that really powered these early services are the same things that bring to Facebook, Pinterest, or Reddit today: The human connection. We would get together on the various services' online forums to talk about our favorite baseball teams, bands, or games. I made friendships on these services that I still have today.
Mind you, it was still painfully slow. When the Hayes Smartmodem 1200 came out – four times the speed – in 1982, you bought one... if you could afford its painfully high $799 price-tag.
[17]Veilid: A secure peer-to-peer network for apps that flips off the surveillance economy
[18]Email out, Slack and Teams in for business communications
[19]Google fixes bug that stopped some Pixel phones from making 911 calls
[20]Open source work makes me appreciate software testing. It's not an academic exercise
I was already writing about technology, so I was lucky enough to receive review units and accounts on pretty much any online service you've ever heard of and many you haven't - Delphi, The Well, or BIX, anyone?
What strikes me the most about looking back is how similar those now largely forgotten services are to today's websites and social networks. Yes, I can now talk to friends and family in real-time on 4K video, but I still mostly write to people. There's not much difference between a FidoNet forum and a Reddit subreddit. It's all about communications, and, for better or worse, that's what those early online services gave us then, and what the internet gives us today. ®
Get our [21]Tech Resources
[1] https://practical-tech.com/2018/01/11/the-real-history-of-the-modern-internet/
[2] http://practical-tech.com/network/wais-and-web-the-future-of-internet-data-searching/49/
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZXNLv1JR4tTuIkjx2ivyMQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] http://practical-tech.com/operating-system/gophering-the-internet/708/
[5] http://practical-tech.com/network/hunting-data-on-the-ftp-line-with-archie/711
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZXNLv1JR4tTuIkjx2ivyMQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZXNLv1JR4tTuIkjx2ivyMQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] http://www.retrothing.com/2009/03/hayes-smartmodem.html
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZXNLv1JR4tTuIkjx2ivyMQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[10] http://www.farsite.com/X.25/X.25_info/X.25.htm
[11] http://www.wired.com/2010/02/0216cbbs-first-bbs-bulletin-board/
[12] https://www.fidonet.org/
[13] https://www.techopedia.com/definition/22754/unix-to-unix-copy-uucp
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/networks&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZXNLv1JR4tTuIkjx2ivyMQAAAFM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhCL5Ygzc24
[16] https://www.pleaseknockstudios.com/post/ascii-pr0n-the-world-s-first-internet-pornography-b-d~
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/12/veilid_privacy_data/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/10/business_comms_swzd/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/05/google_patches_911/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/07/software_testing/
[21] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Not an angry place .
It's social media that brought the rabble.
Ironically, when the internet was more anonymous (everyone used handles) the net was less angry.
I think, weirdly, lack of anonymity gives people with extreme opinions a lot more power than they otherwise would if they were just an anonymous handle.
Under a handle with no "story feed" someone like Andrew Tate would just be another random nutter on the internet.
There was something reassuringly abstract and mysterious about the old internet that has disappeared with the prevalence of people having public profiles and social media feeds etc.
To a non-critical thinker if "Dr B. H. Von Nutter" with a PhD from Harvard says some outlandish shit, it will seem plausible because you know his credentials etc etc and you don't bother thinking about it...but on the old net if "FunkyMonkey42" said the same thing, you'd be inclined to perhaps look into it before believing it. Even if FunkyMonkey42 is the same guy.
If anything have a public credible looking profile makes you *too* credible to a lot of people and perhaps puts people beyond question for a lot of folks.
"He has a PhD from Harvard, he must know what he's talking about".
Re: Not an angry place .
Look at 4chan for what anonymity by default does. That place should be banned and all its users locked up for hatespeech.
Re: Not an angry place .
There's a lot of shit happens on 4chan, but people don't take it as seriously as someone with a well crafted social media profile. Lots of people hide behind credentials and well crafted social media profiles.
4chan spawns crowds of people behind credible ideals, social media spawns crowds behind a single person with ideals that seems credible.
I'd sooner listen to people on 4chan, than people that spout bullshit, parrot style, behind a single fucking lunatic...the latter is how WW2 happened. The former is how the Berlin wall was pulled down.
Re: Not an angry place .
I'm so fond of the old 56k modem handshaking sounds I've had it as my ringtone in the past.
For me the golden-age of the internet was that period where it was possible as an individual to connect without being extortionately expensive and before the full-on commercialisation and rise of entities like FB. Back in the early 2000s I worked as tech support for an ISP and got as an employee benefit unlimited dial-up for £1/month. Though the connection dropped after 1 hour.
Re: Not an angry place .
This. That little nugget of time around Y2K when Google was new and actually worked, websites were not bloated with insane amounts of crap because nobody wanted to wait to download it all, and Usenet was about as close to social media as anybody got. It was far better than a BBS because it was a local rate call and you didn't need to dial into each service individually, but it was before the rot set in, when pretty much the world thing one had to deal with was same twat overusing Flash for really simple things like following a link... halcyon days.
Re: Not an angry place .
> I'm so fond of the old 56k modem handshaking sounds I've had it as my ringtone in the past.
I have it on a tee-shirt.
Re: Not an angry place .
The swivel eyed loons have always been there; the internet, and social media in particular, has allowed them to find each other.
The Amiga BBS era was a ton of fun, if not nearly as accessible as comms today. The major headache for UK users of course was there weren't many cheap ways to make phone calls.
Still, everyone knew someone and sneakernet was a thing...
MySpace
Internet died with MySpace.
Re: MySpace
The Internet died long before MySpace. Some of us are old enough to remember The September That Never Ended.
Re: MySpace
Point taken.
It's all about communications
There was a time in the 80s when I comfortably worked from home with a VT52 and a 1200 baud modem in much the same way as I would now and with similar levels of productivity (unless the line was particularly noisy). It's not so much the technology that's changed but that it's been weaponised for commercial purposes.
I've just followed the links from an adjacent article about [1]Openreach fibre to their "interactive map" - which just sat flashing its progress indicator until I disabled uBlock. And it then refused to give me any information unless I picked out some squares containing traffic lights.
It might once have been about communications, but it's now mostly about pushing controlled messages on condition of surveilled reception. And the faster those links get, the more information that can be extracted and used against you.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/08/openreach_halfway_fiber_milestone/
> people would pick a service on the basis of their file library and how much it cost
Ah yes
> per hour to download them from the online service to your PC
*or* how much they would charge to pop a floppy into the post with Volume 11 : Best of LaTeX on it! Far cheaper than downloading - and it felt a lot faster as well (no babysitting the connection)!
> BIX, anyone?
Nobody ever got raked over the coals for running up an obscene (really, really obscene) 'phone bill from sitting on BIX well into after-office hours. Nope, didn't happen.
> Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX).
That was a Great Thing. As well as reducing the 'phone bills compared to BIX (!) and having forums for properly local people to share news in (Bristol, Avon not Tennessee!), they released the offline reader Ameol, which made it even more affordable - and I still use Ameol as my primary email client[1]
[1] Ameol - it does everything that I want it to do, avoids things that I want to avoid - and the only time that it seemed to have gone bad and refused to show my emails (it is a Win32 exe and can not index into archive files bigger than 2GB - or was it 4GB?) one simple use of "Purge anything you've explicitly marked for deletion" and all was well. They just don't make them like that any more.
"AOL, CompuServe, GEnie, and Prodigy"
In a surprising full circle journey, quite possibly a majority of users now access practically all their content via proprietary portals again -- just it's farcebook, blogger and their associates instead of AOL etc.
The interlude between these eras of proprietisation -- while the independent web site dominated and search engines such as infoseek returned tightly selective results to precisely specified Boolean searches -- lasted little more than a decade, is long past and unlikely to return
"Today, I sit here with my 1 Gigabit-per-second (Gbps) fiber connection that is horrifyingly slow. Trust me, though, it was the bee's knees then."
If your 1Gbps feels slow you're doing something very, very wrong and it probably is everything except that fiber which is the problem on your network.
my 2 cts.
If you close the "Wobbly Fun" and "Oh My Vicar!" 4K streams running in the background I find it helps speed ...
1Gbps? I dream of 1Gbps!
My downlink rate is currently hovering around 3.2 mega bits. Yet it's enough for streaming radio, Netflix, websites, and email. I even used Zoom once.
Yes, downloading stuff takes longer, and uploading stuff takes a minor eternity... but then I grew up with a 2400bps modem that was then upgraded to a 14k4 jobbie. So 3.2M is a luxury in comparison. Plus it's always connected, I don't need to wait for the bouncing oingy-boingy noises to do their thing...
I've noticed that some TV stations send you the 4K version of any programme you have asked for on catch-up, and rely on the equipment at your end to do any conversions.
It doesn't matter that your set-top box can only do 1024p or that your link can only just cope with 720p. You just have to put up with ten seconds of video per minute elapsed, because they can't be arsed.
I remember in Scotland showing....
A neighbour a picture of a planet (can't remember which) from a server in Brazil. Her look of confusion and the "that bloke's nuts" look on her face stopped me mentioning the Internet for a while. I did have another neighbour with a ginger beard and sandals who talked about EPROM and stuff but was clearly mad. Ah, the good old days.
Anyone remember when you could just type a search into Google and get results rather than tailored dross? I've been searching for something specific for weeks and couldn't find it... My device language is English. Local barmaid did the same search, device language Spanish and bingo! Very embarassing.
Re: I remember in Scotland showing....
> I did have another neighbour with a ginger beard and sandals who talked about EPROM and stuff but was clearly mad
Ginger sandals? Never a sign of sanity.
Ah the good old days
When BT would only approve 300baud modems and they cost the price of a modern iPhone
When a local call was 4p/min so you connected to usenet, downloaded the thread titles, flagged the threads, reconnected to download those, typed your replies and reconnected to upload them
Imagine if the UK had free local calls like the USA we might have an internet industry like the USA
Not an angry place .
I remember only too well the Grrr, ggrrr,bizzz, bizzz, bra,bra ffooofg sound of the modem connecting. It's a sound that I will never forget
I also remember that the internet was not something that made me angry...... Quite the opposite ...
Today it appears to have attracted a majority of all that is wrong in contemporary society, publicity, spying, social media manipulation, propoganda and hate groups...