[Technology] Happy birthday Internet, 50 years old today

[ozzygull]

I had a friend who did support for Compuserve from his bedroom in the very early 90's. I remember he said "you can search and get information about anything" so the first thing I searched for on the world wide web was "Brighton and Hove Albion" I remember it bought a up a list of urls to other sites. I very was impressed. It was all text based then.

 

[Easy 10]

I had a friend who did support for Compuserve from his bedroom in the very early 90's. I remember he said "you can search and get information about anything" so the first thing I searched for on the world wide web was "Brighton and Hove Albion" I remember it bought a up a list of urls to other sites. I very was impressed. It was all text based then.

You showed a lot more restraint than I did then.

 

[FamilyGuy]

I remember Gopher (and Kermit), but not the other two. Yeah, my experience goes back to pre www days as well, back when comms programming was a real skill. (Remember using X.25?) I also remember the first time I downloaded a piece of software from a bulletin board rather than waiting for a floppy disk to arrive in the post. Wow!

And the first modem I used had a thing called an acoustic coupler, where you actually put the phone on the modem and the telephone receiver transmitted (and received) the handshaking and data as sound. I think it ran at 300 Baud! (Mind you I also remember using 80 column punch cards).

Blimey I'm old.

My mate tried to send a short message to the works mainframe thru an acoustic coupler via the pay phone in the Red Lion in Turners Hill.
Inevitably it didn't work so he had to stop drinking and drive to work.
I remember being very impressed with the technology even if it didn't work.

 

[boik]

Yeah, it was about 30 years ago that I first used it - pre-WWW days.

Anyone remember Archie, Veronica and Gopher?

Yep, been online since '91. Back in those days it was still acceptable to finger someone you didn't know!

 

[happypig]

I started out with a 12/75 modem, a commodore 64 and a Prestel/Micronet account in 1987 after playing with some stuff at work.
My Prestel mailbox was 219997777 (I knew one of the Prestel sysops and he wangled me a decent one).
Graduated to bulletin boards and, for a while, had a point off a fidonet node.

I remember when only geeks and nerds had computers, now every idiot has one.

 

[Weststander]

A O Hell.
I used their message boards, before the creation of the likes of northstandchat.

A mate used Yahoo and Lycos.

 

[Gwylan]

I started out with a 12/75 modem, a commodore 64 and a Prestel/Micronet account in 1987 after playing with some stuff at work.

Micronet 800! Now there's a blast from the past. I did some work for the crazy David Babsky when he was just setting up the system. I was fresh from journalism college and looking for work and spent a day putting together a news feed. There were jobs going there but I wasn't really geek enough then ... and I thought that David looked a bit of a nutter.

It was a truly interesting concept though.