90s internet
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man i remember goin on the Internet on windows 95 it was wild as a kid pop ups all over the place no clue what a virus was slow ass dialup it was the wildwest back then seen stuff online was like wtf is this and internet explorer yahoo as the search
i miss it some times but that may be the younger me as the new internet is much faster with much more you can look up and more then llike 2 or 3 browsers lol -
@edieto OMG! The 1995 up tp 2000's were AOL browser, Netscrap and InternetExploder.
And slooow with 16KB/s, with modems making shrill music while dialing-in. -
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@mikeyb2001 Yesss!
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@edieto Maybe you'll find something from the good old days here:
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@DoctorG sometimes a quick youtube search gives you exactly what you're looking for
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Also a nice page with the timeline of old internet days is this one, beginning with this
And the first Spam Mail
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@mikeyb2001 i do that some times its a blast to see how much the internet has come along from then to now
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@mikeyb2001 goin to save that lol
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@stardepp Oh my good gravy. I had to look up an old site I used to run. It was for gay ranchers/cowboys back when we were all pretty much in the closet for safety.
What a thing the internet was for us back then!
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@Catweazle Of special interest in the Arpanet image:
The "squiggles" are a satellite connection:
"NORSAR was the first non-US site included in ARPANET in June 1973. Its connection went via the Tanum Earth Station in Sweden to the Seismic Data Analysis Center (SDAC) in Virginia, United States."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NORSARFor me the "golden age" of the web was the decade from 1996 (when I started uni studies and got access) to maybe about ~2006 when it went downhill with social media, rampant commercialization, ads and tracking and Google took over basically everything.
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Pre-WWW: Any person knowing the old mailbox system (BBS) for communication?
UseNet?
I remember using Mausnet in DACH countries. -
@DoctorG I did some BBSing from a friend's house in the early 90s. Mostly to download Amiga scene demos and pirated games
The BBS Documentary by Jason Scott is worth a watch for anyone interested in computing history (it's a lot of talking though...)
https://archive.org/details/bbs_the_documentaryJason also maintains a huge collection of the types of text files you'd find on BBSes, including the infamous "Anarchist Cookbook".
http://textfiles.comUseNet?
I used Xnews to read newsgroups in the 00s - mostly lurked on
opera.beta
and trawledalt.binaries
for "interesting pics"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xnews -
@DoctorG, the other day @Ruarí mencioned Happy Net Box, which use an paleolitic funcion from Windows, Mac and Unix systems, "FINGER", which is still working from the cmd line. In Linux isn't native and need to be installed first.
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@Catweazle said in 90s internet:
In Linux isn't native and need to be installed first.
Not true, in my experience it is pre-installed on many (most?) distros.
P.S. If you do have it to hand run this from the terminal
finger [email protected]
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Also it is such a simple protocol there are a whole bunch of tricks to get the server to return you a result with other tools anyway. For example to use a basic tool like netcat
$ printf 'vivaldiversion\r\n' | nc happynetbox.com 79
Or telnet
$ (echo vivaldiversion; sleep 1) | telnet happynetbox.com 79
This is how you trick curl via either using telnet as a protocol
$ printf 'vivaldiversion\r\n' | curl telnet://happynetbox.com:79
or make it look like gopher
$ curl gopher://happynetbox.com:79/0vivaldiversion
Side note. I still have a bunch of stuff hosted on gopher. I last updated it late in 2023 but I should probably upload something again. If you have
lynx
installed, you can see for yourself.lynx gopher://sdf.org/1/users/r0/phlog/
EDIT: Ok I just updated my gopher based "journal" and finger status on a couple of different servers.
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@Ruarí said in 90s internet:
… run this from the terminal
finger [email protected]
I actually use that all the time on our various test machines to check/remind myself what we have public at any given time.
Also fun
finger [email protected]
If you want to check on the version numbers of our desktop competitors.
P.P.S. I'll let your work out my update timestamps on those. Yes I am a wierdo.
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Oh and @Catweazle if you are looking for finger hosting, as well as HappyNetBox, there is also https://plan.cat which is also (wierdly) accessible via ActivityPub so you can see it from your Mastodon account. Because… well… because… why not?
i.e., either
finger [email protected]
Or: https://social.vivaldi.net/@[email protected]/112971838920926579
EDIT: Oh and it also has an RSS feed https://plan.cat/~ruari.rss because again… why not?
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@Ruarí said in 90s internet:
P.P.S. I'll let your work out my update timestamps on those. Yes I am a wierdo.
Yes you are...
My percentages of time-fu is crap so I resort to:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=45.9%25+of+24+hoursThen:
$ date -d "00:00 today + 11 hours 57.6 seconds" 16 Aug 2024 11:00:57
Hmm, but that would mean you updated it long before you posted the topic?
16 Aug 2024, 12:38
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@Pathduck
Close but you forgot about timezones and my script works in UTC, which is actually stated there if you read carefully.EDIT: Actually now I see you did account for UTC so … correct.
Here is how I would have done it starting with
Updated: 2024-08-16 [45.9% @0 Lon]
First, let's convert that to seconds
864*45.9 ≈ 39657
[rounded down to the nearest second]
Now make that into minutes
39657/60 ≈ 660
minutes into the day (again with time you always round down)
Now make that hours
660/60 ≈ 11
hours into the day or 11:00 as you noted
Finally it states "@0 Lon" or "at 0° Longitude", thus UTC. While Norway (where you are I are based) is currently CEST (Central European Summer Time) or UTC +2 hours and thus that was updated last at 13:00 (1PM) Norwegian local time.
Why!? Well… why do I do race penny farthings or commute via unicycle in the snow? To amuse "myself" because I am a weirdo!