IN OTHER NEWS

[jmelesky@tinylad.social]

@blogdiva@mastodon.social My first was the dialup service Prodigy in 90 or 91, which I believe used its own protocol (it definitely used its own image formats). Technically only a small slice of it was the internet (just email, iirc), but I used that bit, so it counts.

I remember being envious of CompuServe users because they had the “cb simulator” (early text-only chatrooms).

There was a brief period in the 90s where having a 7-letter last name was, well, not “cool”, exactly, but maybe “convenient in a neat way”. So many usernames had a technical cap at 8 characters and “first initial last name” was such a common way for organizations to assign usernames.

[revndm@queer.cool]

@blogdiva gopher is so simple, so beautiful…

[levzadov@kolektiva.social]

@whitneymcn @blogdiva

Me, too, them plus the WELL. It The internet was better then. There weren't as many assholes.

[paul_ipv6@infosec.exchange]

@blogdiva

ftp from some universities was my first experience on the "internet". that and usenet over uucp.

[lazzarello@mastodon.teamnerds.cool]

@blogdiva usenet over a telnet connection to the campus mainframe

[chaos0815@phpc.social]

@blogdiva I was online before the internet. Can’t tell what the 300 baud mode. Used as a protocol. Something like „8N1“. 8 bit, no parity, 1 error bit.

[hakona@im.alstadheim.no]

@blogdiva My fist proper *internet* exposure was ftp from a "door" on a dial-up BBS, which in turn dialled in to something internet-connected. 1987 or 1988 ? Discussion-groups on the BBSes I frequented sure felt a lot like what we have here on the fedi, except it was in a text-window. On a hand-me-down 300 baud modem at first, 1985-ish. By 1993 when NCSA-Mosaic came out, I was doing informatics. It was like "hey, pretty neat" , not "this is history in the making" .

[flux@wandering.shop]

@jpaskaruk second phone line? Madness! We put up with daily refresh rates for overnight transfers! @blogdiva

[log@mastodon.sdf.org]

@blogdiva > telnet 199.199.122.9:8000

[ozdreaming@infosec.exchange]

@blogdiva @TeflonTrout Compuserve was too expensive -- my dad cancelled it and got GEnie instead. Which still had some cool stuff, e.g. JMS posting about Babylon 5 ... but by that time I was already hooked on Usenet.

(Many of JMS' posts from the early 90s are archived at https://jmsnews.com/messages/archive).

[jpaskaruk@growers.social]

@Flux @blogdiva to be clear, the second line was for the BBS, but it was also to stop me from locking up the house phone line from after school till midnight. BBSes were the first social "scene" that I felt I fit into on any level. I've always had friends, but rarely a squad, other than bandmates.

[encthenet@flyovercountry.social]

@blogdiva

Pretty much gopher here too.

I had to dial into a VAX, and all I could do was telnet to other sites. So I would telnet to a "gopher site" (really a gopher client that was publicly available via telnet) to browse the internet. I didn't have ftp access, and many gopher sites didn't have sz installed, but boombox . micro . umn . edu was one of the few, and through that I was able to download FreeBSD and other stuff.

Shortly after that, I found slirp and a local free net provided free shell and so I used that.

#getOffMyLawn

[whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz]

@LevZadov @blogdiva To be fair, I think it's possible that most of us were assholes in the '80s, but we just didn't realize it yet.

[clive@saturation.social]

@blogdiva

I am <holds fingers within 1 mm of each other> *this* close to starting a new personal site served entirely and only on gopher

what a cool technology it was

Felt like such magic

[gbargoud@masto.nyc]

@clive @blogdiva

Have you seen this attempt at a modern successor to gopher?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

[rberger@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva I registered one of the first .com DNS names (datacube.com) and ran USENET uucp forwarders. Started an ISP (InterNex) in 1993 pioneering ISDN high speed access and International server farms.

[missconstrue@mefi.social]

@blogdiva I built a blue box to so I could talk to friends in other countries. I used it on pay phones. Remember pay phones? My first modem had a spot where you hung the receiver of your phone. I was on arpa/ darpa nets when there were only mainframes, I launched a dial-in isp in the mid 80s, that was shut by a search warrant taking servers that I’ve still never gotten back and it’s been over 40 years, and was one of the first 500 sites on the www. I had a business card with the title Web Mistress. I’m an old.

[clive@saturation.social]

@blogdiva @gbargoud

I think I dimly heard about that, but not for a long time, thank you for reminding me!

[mxchara@seattle.pink]

@ozdreaming @blogdiva @TeflonTrout remember when JMS could sometimes be found on the specially moderated "Babylon 5" Usenet group? Gawd were those the days. I feel like they prefigured much that was to follow (e.g. toxic Steven Universe fandom)

[mxchara@seattle.pink]

@encthenet @blogdiva oh wow slirp I'd forgotten about fiddling around with that, and other tricks to run TCP/IP applications via a shell account