90s internet

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.

Pathduck

@Ruarí Yeah I did figure that @0 Lon meant 0 longitude but then that would mean you updated the finger long after the Snap was released...

$ date -d "00:00 UTC today + 11 hours 57.6 seconds"
16 Aug 2024 13:00:57

And that's just lazy... Someone might make a script to check the finger and compare to the current Snapshot but there's no point if it's delayed by that much

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

From the timestamp of the Snapshot release post

Ruarí

@Pathduck said in 90s internet:

updated the finger long after the Snap was released...

I didn't update finger. It is a script that does that, the same one that posts to

https://social.vivaldi.net/@vivaldiversiontracker

The script runs on a cron job but it only checks for new versions every 30 minutes and it uses public meta data. It will only post to mastodon or update finger if there is a new build when it runs.

30 minute checks are good enough IMHO, you are going to average within 15 minutes. If you need more accurate you can pull the information from the same place my script finds the version.

Pathduck

@Ruarí said in 90s internet:

If you need more accurate you can pull the information from the same place my script finds the version.

Yeah, it's too late in the day to start mucking about with xmllint

$ curl -I https://update.vivaldi.com/update/1.0/win/appcast.x64.xml
HTTP/2 200
server: nginx/1.18.0 (Ubuntu)
date: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 14:22:04 GMT
content-type: text/xml
content-length: 734
last-modified: Fri, 16 Aug 2024 10:37:21 GMT
etag: "66bf2be1-2de"
strict-transport-security: max-age=31536000; includeSubdomains;
accept-ranges: bytes

Ruarí

@Pathduck said in 90s internet:

From the timestamp of the Snapshot release post

I would assume that is almost certainly a timestamp for when I started to compose it (or first saved a draft), not when it went live. I do not set a time for blog posts to go live as some do. I just draft them and then make live as soon as I am done.

My first comment is probably closer to when it was actually published.

Ruarí

@Pathduck said in 90s internet:

Yeah, it's too late in the day to start mucking about with xmllint

You could regex out the version number, you do not need to parse the XML properly. Though FWIW that is not the file I am looking at. I am using the same source as updates the panel on the blog.

Though I have occasionally forgotten to update the side panel and then the masto bot (and finger) do not update, which is usually how I work out I forgot.

thatworkshop

@Ruarí said in 90s internet:

Or: https://social.vivaldi.net/@[email protected]/112971838920926579

I am very interested to know how this is configured to redirect to https://plan.cat/~ruari#1723813453 ?

Edit: For this redirect to work, you should NOT be logged in https://social.vivaldi.net (try in incognito mode).

Pathduck

@thatworkshop said in 90s internet:

I am very interested to know how this is configured to redirect to https://plan.cat/~ruari#1723813453 ?

There's no redirect - it uses ActivityPub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActivityPub
Though for the life of me I can't find their API endpoint... Maybe @Ruarí knows...

On the topic of the "90s internet" - ActivityPub is an open protocol, just like the internet and the web was built on.

Even though I don't care much for "social media" I think this is more in line with the original ethos of the internet - open and publicly available protocols and APIs made for the benefit of everyone - not proprietary ones made by corporations to make money (and cut off public access when they feel like it).

thatworkshop

There's no redirect - it uses ActivityPub
I was aware of ActivityPub; the reason I asked this "redirection" question is:

This is the first time I am going to a mastodon profile which then immediately and automatically redirects to another site (that doesn't look like a typical mastodon).