IN OTHER NEWS

[lysdexic@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva
Finger, chatting up boys from other universities. I was bad at it.

Dammit, not finger, phone.

[whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz]

@blogdiva Ooh, my friends and I started with local BBSes in the mid-80s -- a friend's older brother had a 1200 baud modem!

It was Usenet and Gopher that put me on the internet.

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva SLiP. A local university had a dial-in that allowed you to launch SLiP and get a nice little connection. Suddenly I could use Mosaic. Once that happened, the BBS that I used to run always had a busy tone. 🫠

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva @FeloniousPunk ... I haven't stopped downloading music. Strangely most of the music I download was released in 1975-1985.

[paradegrotesque@mastodon.sdf.org]

@blogdiva

14400,8,n,1

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva I should note that the dial-in dropped you to a shell menu and I could use Archie, Gopher, and Pine, or drop to the shell easily. And while exploring with Archie and Gopher was interesting, Mosaic really changed it all for me.

Before that I was dialing up long distance BBS's and snagging cool tfiles, warez, and OS/2 stuff.

[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