90s internet

DoctorG

@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.

mikeyb2001

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0

DoctorG

@mikeyb2001 Yesss!

stardepp

@edieto Maybe you'll find something from the good old days here:

https://archive.org

mikeyb2001

@DoctorG sometimes a quick youtube search gives you exactly what you're looking for

Catweazle

Also a nice page with the timeline of old internet days is this one, beginning with this

alt text

And the first Spam Mail

alt text

edieto

@mikeyb2001 i do that some times its a blast to see how much the internet has come along from then to now

edieto

@mikeyb2001 goin to save that lol

PublicWolf

@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!

https://web.archive.org/web/20020802194222/http://www.crotalus.com/archive/2001-02-05/2001-02-05.html

Pathduck

@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/NORSAR

For 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.

DoctorG

Pre-WWW: Any person knowing the old mailbox system (BBS) for communication?
UseNet?
I remember using Mausnet in DACH countries.

Pathduck

@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_documentary

Jason also maintains a huge collection of the types of text files you'd find on BBSes, including the infamous "Anarchist Cookbook".
http://textfiles.com

UseNet?

I used Xnews to read newsgroups in the 00s - mostly lurked on opera.beta and trawled alt.binaries for "interesting pics"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xnews

Catweazle

@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.

Ruarí

@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]

Ruarí

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.

Ruarí

@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.

Ruarí

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?

Pathduck

@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+hours

Then:

$ 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

Ruarí

@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!

Ruarí

@Pathduck Ok, I failed to see that you did account for the timezone. Silly me. I have updated my previous posting.

So what is this "16 Aug 2024, 12:38" and where are you getting that from?

I do not manually† update those finger pages for browser version numbers, a shell script running on my work machine does using public meta data, run via a cron job every half hour.

† Sometimes I also run the script manually rather than waiting for cron to kick in after posting a build publicaly, so it will occasionally have other timestamps when it updates.