I miss web 1.0 … for those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, that was the period from like 1989 up until 2005 or so, where the web was simple… Geocities pages were a thing … Netscape Navigator… etc.
I learned to write HTML during that time, and I had a cool geocities site, and so did my friends. lol
Everyone was fond of the blink and marquee tags, and HTML hell was abound. I personally love this article by Eric Raymond, because even though I love the old school web, I could never stand these things:
Before that, there was internet but no web.
Email, ftp, telnet, gopher… not much else
I remember building a webpage . It would have been 1990’s.
I wrote it in Latex, and used latex2html… bit of a cheat but I was tool lazy to learn html.
I used navigator up till about 2010… in BSD. Did not have a DE, you started it from the command line. . It was not fast at 9600 baud on a dialup modem. Then I got a 56K modem…
Its a good thing early web pages were simple… todays would never display at that rate.
Those were my IRC days… I used to mess with slackware linux back then.
Before that it was all BBSes for me … I had a 1200bps modem, then a 2400, then a 9600, then I got a 14.4, then toward the days of actual internet, but before we got broadband, I got a 56K modem…
To me those were the best days ever to be into computing.
If I remember correctly, my first modem was for my Atari and it was at 600 baud. It was so slow that when I went to the BBS and click on a message to read, I could actually read the text as it was being display.
I actually used to telnet or SSH to my shell on my ISP and edit the html using vi
Note : that is the content of index.html which I keep on my NAS - a snapshot of stuff that my ISP eventually killed off around 2007…
“…of these pages are over 8 years old and look like a sick monkey sh…” should read “…are over 25 years old…”
Lots a lofi animated gifs that I created in Autodesk 3D Studio (for MS-DOS)
Before 1997 - I was enrolled as a mature age (my thirties) student at uni, and used the modem pool to dial up - that modem pool was 300 baud! I’d just use various shells for email and usenet (Pine and Elm?) and if I downloaded anything - it was quicker to drive to the nearest campus and copy on to floppy disks! My modem was a “state of the art” (in 1994) 14400 ISA modem card…
Sorry too old … But I built my first site 30 years back before all this existed using a BBC b computer and it was based on Teletext type screens with dial up modems you distributed your telephone number on other sites or in magazines to give people access but no external links just pages created in house.
I taught computing in what was at that stage called a ITeC for 16 and 17 year old school leavers and the site was about the courses we offered and got a good rating in pc magazine.
Life before the internet.
Then went on to writing html and teaching that at uni early days and apple pagemill.
I remember 1976 - CDC (Control Data) Cyber NOS (Network Operating System) # 1.0 - Gazillions of slave terminals - CPU about the size of a small house in a/c room with a raised floor. All command line. No disks. You need to know OS commands and those of edit utility (numbered lines) - no word processor, per se. Edits? That was lovely - you had to re-type the error, delimiter “/”, followed by the correct version. B/W screen. Nothing for sissies. Programming language? FORTRAN IV. Yup, I am THAT old! Fun? I dunno, but I needed that “A”. Needless to say, this was all before the Internet, and even personal computers.
Hi @jhorne.ial ,
Welcome. I have been there . File names limited to 6 letters and all capitals.
Used Control Data SCOPE before that, and IBM JCL before that. All fortran IV. If you wanted to used a computer in 1960’s you learnt Fortran, and put it on punched cards,
Yes, I would say it was fun. , but also frustratingly slow. … overnight turnarounds , line printer output, reel tapes to store data or shift it between computors.
Oh yeah, that brings back memories. Punch cards. One wrong character and hours of work blew up. Those variable name limitations gave a new meaning to “parsimonious”. These kids don’t know what it was like and how good they have it now. But, then, those ENIAC folks would say the same to us, with their patch cords, vacuum tubes, etc.
I had a brief encounter with a vacuum tube computer… called UTECOM. My memory is of a guy walking around a room full of mercury vapour tubes, replacing them as they failed. Mean time between failure was 10 mins… it severely limited how long you could run a program .
On UTECOM, output was punched cards… you took it to a tabulator machine if you wanted it on paper.
Cheers
Neville
No coding experience but I remember connecting to the internet using the “ultra high speed” 56kbps dial-up modem and using lycos, altavisa etc.
Yes some of my early online reading was on geocities and Yahoo webpages/profiles; Yahoo groups were a thing back then and many great ones too. Netscape navigator (the horror!) would take forever to open a site. Around the same time, Dr. Craig Ventor’s Celera Genomics mapped the entire human genome…
I remember feeling like I was a genius back in the late 90s hand coding a photo gallery in HTML and having the full version of the picture open in the same new window using the HTML target attribute. The site was hosted on my ISP’s web space. Do you remember when they gave us 20 or 50MB of web space with our subscription?
Yes I do, I even used the internet (professionally) before the Web (3, with JavaScript etc…). In 1987 at office (CEA). Some old mailing lists messages have been signed by me (Basile Starynkevitch in France) as basile@soleil.serma.cea.fr
