Do you remember the early days of the internet?

Parent Cafe
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<p>Enjoyed a search yesterday of vintage 80s and early 90s clips about “internet” and early technology. What a hoot! Great fun to show your kids what the ‘olden days’ were like! </p>

<p>We can’t post links to videos so just cut and paste these key words into youtube and take the top listing. </p>

<ol>
<li>radioshack 1990 cell phone</li>
</ol>

<p>This one is HILARIOUS!! Just watch for yourself</p>

<ol>
<li>the revolution of the internet 1993</li>
</ol>

<p>Great newstory about this new thing called internet (before they put the ‘the’ in front of it!). Look at the text! Get a load of his guy saying how everyone is so civilized on the internet. Already seen as a social networking tool. </p>

<ol>
<li>The Internet in 1969</li>
</ol>

<p>This one is almost spooky. They envisioned the internet as we know it today! </p>

<ol>
<li>1981 primitive internet</li>
</ol>

<p>One day we can imagine people will get their news off the computer! Sort of sad the newspaper industry jumped so excitedly into the technology that would be their downfall.</p>

<ol>
<li>Bill Gates and The Quiz Machine</li>
</ol>

<p>Bill Gates being interviewed by David Letterman about this thing called the internet.</p>

<p>What do you remember? </p>

<p>I remember using the mainframe to format my thesis in the mid 80s, and then found the transition to Wordperfect in 1988 to be such a pain! Why couldn’t I just stick with the mainframe template!?</p>

<p>In the mid 80s I was emailing to boyfriend from the mainframe and used to print our exchanges on that giant green and white striped paper that we walked over to wait and pick up from the computer printing center.</p>

<p>I remember being at a party in 1991 and our friends talking about being able to play games and interact with strangers on their computer. It was soooo cool. </p>

<p>I joined AOL in I think 1994 or 1995 and got wonderful benefits from a grief support group online when my dad was dying. I even met up with an internet friend who lost her mother around the same time. </p>

<p>I also remember my first online purchase from a company in Chicago around 1993. </p>

<p>And around that time I was enthralled by netcast? primecast? what was it called? anyone remember this? I couldn’t believe it was so visual and could provide real time updates of the weather and news on my work computer!</p>

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<p>I was a member of PRODIGY. This was when dinosaurs roamed the earth. (1992)</p>

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<p>Punch cards.</p>

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<p>eWorld :(. RIP</p>

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<p>I vaguely remember something called The Well?</p>

<p>I am so old , I remember searching online without Google! :p</p>

<p>however I also admit that we had dialup until last fall.
;)</p>

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<p>I remember The Well! I was part of it back in 1989-90… used to cost me a long-distance call to get on their bulletin board.</p>

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<p>punch cards… LOL - they made great cardstock for my recipe collection which was typed up using WordPerfect and glued onto them!</p>

<p>our 386 laptop :)</p>

<p>our small company using AOL family account as our corporate e-mail (1994)</p>

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<p>I remember BBS - dial-up local on-line discussions and bulletin boards from the late 80s. Some were linked together across the nation to form a sort of internet. The Well was a BBS.</p>

<p>I joined the real internet in 1990, the first in my family to do so. Back then there was no World Wide Web. But you could access other people’s sites through functions called gopher and telnet. The internet itself consisted mostly of e-mail and the Usenet discussion groups. There was no spam and no graphics - just text. The first commercial spam message hit the internet in the usenet - it was a law firm advertsing themselves. Everyone was outraged. Somethings were the same, such as ■■■■■■ and flame wars.</p>

<p>The big cultural change happened when AOL plugged into the internet. I don’t rmember the exact year, but the internet has never been the same. They had developed their net culture and the two didn’t mix very well. We internet veterans considered the AOLers to be an invasion of the annoying and clueless.</p>

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<p>I joined Prodigy in 1989 – early adopter! I was addicted to my 2400 bps modem. Man, I thought I was state of the art!</p>

<p>It was amazing what you could find on the Usenet…like lyrics to any song ever recorded, even if there were no lyrics in the album notes. We thought we’d found the keys to the kingdom.</p>

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<p>What I love is the look on your kids face when you tell them about using punch-cards in the lab, typing your research papers on a typewriter, keeping ledgers by hand before the days of PCs and spreadsheets…oh my, another world.</p>

<p>BUT I still claim that our generation had the best music and bands and DD mostly agrees. Although a song will come on, I’ll start singing and she’ll look at me with “that look” and say “you know that song?”.</p>

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<p>My university’s computer was an IBM 360-40 with 1 MB of main memory, and that was a lot (and it was huge)! That was about 15 years before the Internet became somewhat known to the public.</p>

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<p>I had a professor who told us if we knew how to punch cards we would have a job for life!</p>

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<p>Punch cards. Bubbling in code statements on cards using a pencil. Audio couplers. Storing your program on paper punch tape. Great big floppy disks that were truly floppy. </p>

<p>Back in the early to mid 90’s, when the only browser was Mosaic, you emailed the url of any newly created website to the folks at CERN so they could add it to their once-a-week announcement of new websites available worldwide. It was not a lengthy list. </p>

<p>Around that same time period, my parents were at my office. I sat my mother down in front of my computer, showed her how a browser worked, and let her loose. When I came back in five minutes, she’d found her way to the Louvre’s website.</p>

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<p>Punch cards! The first class in which I was introduced to computers was the last year they were used on our campus…so I ran my first statistical analyses with punch cards, and then never used them again. I still remember my prof saying how much better it was than doing it by hand like the old days. </p>

<p>I still remember someone trying to explain to me about this idea of files and folders on a computer…and the analogy made no sense to me whatsoever. </p>

<p>My kids asked about the days before computing and the internet. They actually looked so puzzled and pained with confusion, saying “but what did you DO?” They truly can not fathom how we survived.</p>

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<p>Remember the olden days of using a keyboard and mouse? It took them forever to get to the obvious, using eyes and thoughts. Does anyone know what an “embalmer” did, back when people died?</p>

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<p>I had a Compuserve account. I remember purchasing books from a first year start-up company named Amazon and how the reviews said it wouldn’t last. I also remember having contests to see who could get a program to run in the fewest punch cards (mine involved having several non-fatal errors).</p>

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<p>When I started in computers we were so poor we couldn’t afford “1’s”. We had to write all our programs using only “0’s”. /old joke</p>

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<p>It was probably about 1985 or 1986. I was taking a class called “Computers in Education.” One of the things we had to do was show that we could dial up a particular website. I don’t think that’s what it was called then. We had to sit in front of the PC, dial into a phone/modem, and call the site. The special numbers were available in a large phonebook like directroy. For some reason I recall many were related to agriculture. I do remember the TA talking about bulletin boards he used. </p>

<p>I think I opened up my first email account about 1995 or 1996. I know in early 1997 I used the internet to purchase some party supplies/food that was not readily available in my area. By the end of the year I was doing Christmas shopping online.</p>

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<p>Slithy Tove … you beat me to it … paper tape. Punch cards were so much later…</p>

<p>And the hilarity of filling my college roomie’s honeymoon suitcase with the ‘holes’. In fact, I put an envelope of them in my keepsake box and i am going to somehow get them on her for …oops, missed 35th, will have to shoot for 40th anniversary.</p>

<p>OK, what about PDPx programming with toggle switches?</p>

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<p>My first Internet purchase were Southwest Airlines tickets to Phoenix, I think in 1997. I called the airline to confirm that I indeed bought them! In 1999, I was buying all my tickets and trading stocks online. </p>

<p>punch cards were the reason I decided to choose a career that would not require any programming skills!</p>