121–130 of 171 posts
I find it fascinating that the web changed just about every industry out there, apart from the one it set out to change - academic publishing.. It's still an oligopoly, with the same, small number of players acting as gatekeepers
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Long distance calling used to be a pretty big deal. Even intrastate calls outside of your local calling area could be expensive--in fact, sometimes more than interstate. For BBSs, there was various software available that basically let you logon, do your uploads and downloads of messages, hang up and do your reading and writing offline. Go back a few years further and people would do all kinds of tricks if, for examp…
Call forwarding was one way to bypass intrastate long distant charges. My bestie ran a co-op. Members would get dedicated POTS line, add call forwarding feature, run a dedicated relay node. He maintained both dialer (client) and router (server) software. You enter phone number, dialer would pick a toll-free node in that general direction (telco provisioned prefixes corresponded to physical exchanges). Node would answ…
I can't see anything on the linked page to suggest that the web was "born" 30 years ago today (i.e. 20 December 1990). On the contrary, it says it was invented in 1989. Wikipedia[1] lists the official release date of the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, as 25 December 1990. Tim Berners-Lee has said that the first version was "whimsically dated 901225 although I was NOT working on Christmas Day -- it was prepared some…
I found this document https://web.archive.org/web/20130605043221/https://timeline.... It says “The world’s first website and server go live at CERN” on 1990-12-20
the history page here https://timeline.web.cern.ch/timelines/The-birth-of-the-Worl... doesn't list this date - does list the availability of the browser in xmas day
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We? I think roughly around my year of birth (2001 - if that makes anyone feel old) is one of the last to grow up with "proper" computers rather than just iPads and phones.
On that note, it's always funny how kids try to use old hardware like a touchscreen
When I set up my first website, you had to email CERN to be put on a list of websites around the world, that was published on their website... I think it was about the 60th (I forget the exact number, it was a long time ago :) website in the UK, serving the “needs” of (ok, playing with tech for) the image processing group in Kings College London’s physics dept while doing my PhD. The server ran on my desktop DECstati…
I love stories of yore like this. I got my first machine in ~1985 or so... I convinced my dad he needed a machine for his business - and then I just played populous and called long distance from Tahoe to a BBS in San Jose to play the pit and trade wars. I got grounded for a month because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious. He yelled at me one time and said "stop wasting your time on the damn…
It didn't help that I didn't have good grades and got in my fair of trouble. I stuck with it though, and within a year of getting out of college made more than my parents combined.
When I set up my first website, you had to email CERN to be put on a list of websites around the world, that was published on their website... I think it was about the 60th (I forget the exact number, it was a long time ago :) website in the UK, serving the “needs” of (ok, playing with tech for) the image processing group in Kings College London’s physics dept while doing my PhD. The server ran on my desktop DECstati…
I love stories of yore like this. I got my first machine in ~1985 or so... I convinced my dad he needed a machine for his business - and then I just played populous and called long distance from Tahoe to a BBS in San Jose to play the pit and trade wars. I got grounded for a month because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious. He yelled at me one time and said "stop wasting your time on the damn…
We understood each other better after that day.
(Of course, now that I own a home, I wish I'd done more of the engine tinkering... I learned what a carburetor is and how to clean it via FaceTime.)
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Call forwarding was one way to bypass intrastate long distant charges. My bestie ran a co-op. Members would get dedicated POTS line, add call forwarding feature, run a dedicated relay node. He maintained both dialer (client) and router (server) software. You enter phone number, dialer would pick a toll-free node in that general direction (telco provisioned prefixes corresponded to physical exchanges). Node would answ…
Phreaking as a Service
We can call the setup a PhaaSer. You're welcome world.
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I love stories of yore like this. I got my first machine in ~1985 or so... I convinced my dad he needed a machine for his business - and then I just played populous and called long distance from Tahoe to a BBS in San Jose to play the pit and trade wars. I got grounded for a month because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious. He yelled at me one time and said "stop wasting your time on the damn…
I did a similar thing when I was at college. I’d set up ‘Empire’[1], a sort of multiplayer civilization server at college, and I’d graduated to an Atari ST with a massively-fast 2400 baud modem (none of that 300-baud or even 1200-baud stuff for me!) which cost me a fair amount of my student budget for the term... Anyway, I bought it 1 month after we’d all collectively rented a house, and we’d already had a telephone…
My first ever income from programming was writing some machine code to run in a USR$ on an Atari 8-bit BBS. Turns out the XModem checksum calculation was slow enough that when 1200 baud modems came out, there was a noticeable delay between chunks for BASIC to calc the checksum. At around 20 bytes long, I was paid $20. Man, do I wish I could make $1/byte now...