11–20 of 31 posts
UUCP style email addresses. JANET addresses being reversed compared to Internet/DNS. The web didn't exist. Anonymous FTP servers. Usenet before Eternal September. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
Stolen "PCPursuit" and Telnet accounts, so long distance bills wouldn't be so bad. When "YMODEM" was a real improvement in information technology.
Telenet. :) For the uninitiated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet Another big one was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet The reason some big online providers (some or all of, for example: AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy) had so many local access numbers (which was important since long-distance was so expensive) was that those numbers were actually Telenet / Tymnet, which the client used to connect to the service.…
BTW I am not a true veteran, all of that you could see just 20 years ago.
Stolen "PCPursuit" and Telnet accounts, so long distance bills wouldn't be so bad. When "YMODEM" was a real improvement in information technology.
Telenet. :) For the uninitiated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet Another big one was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet The reason some big online providers (some or all of, for example: AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy) had so many local access numbers (which was important since long-distance was so expensive) was that those numbers were actually Telenet / Tymnet, which the client used to connect to the service.…
AOL's seekrit superpower when they were "$CITYNAME Online" for several values of $CITY, as i was told, was that they ran on a big insurance company Stratus cluster as a slack time job and had access to both the compute time and the inbound X.25 for "free" for a while there.
No batshit from our lovely governments. Nokia S40 or similar 2G phones with J2ME apps for surfing in OperaMini and chatting in Jimm, but not simultaneously. File sharing services like Rapidshare before torrents. A was an only way for layout. Macromedia Flash was neat before it became a mess. Liberty Reserve in pre-Bitcoin era. Much slower computers which used to be much faster from user's point of view. BTW I am not…
an amazing new vector-based animation technology called Future Splash that had nothing to do with Adobe or Macromedia.
While probably not "internet" by definition, it was a global network that allowed people to exchange information relatively free, with a couple days latency.
It had discussion groups much like Usenet, and I vividly remember dialing my local BBS every 30-60 minutes when waiting for a reply to a discussion :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path
Munnari being the UUCP connection between Australia and the rest of the world, run by Robert Elz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Robert_Elz
https://dif.vic.gov.au/editorial/4194-a/a-computer-server-an...
running Usenet news and people paying for newsgroups to subsidize the phone bill to Hawaii.
Dial up bulletin boards, connecting via FIDOnet, then slowly being absorbed into Usenet groups and mailing lists.
gopher servers, ftp servers, spam email, "endless September"...
I'm old :)
UUCP style email addresses. JANET addresses being reversed compared to Internet/DNS. The web didn't exist. Anonymous FTP servers. Usenet before Eternal September. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
Using Archie to find files on anonymous FTP servers.