Funny stories, strange, tragic or sad ones, anything goes.
from 90-93 mk and I used to chase each other around local BBS's at 1200 baud (2400 if you were rich). I went off grid for a few years and when I came back in 1996 the whole world had changed and you got an email address for FREE from the university. While I was off grid I remember being at some one's house and seeing Netscape for the first time. I remember my mind exploding and thinking "some one has connected all of the BBSs and put a GUI on them!"
My first trek into the internet was sneaking into the computer lab at the local college to read USENET for some technical stuff on how to fix my Amiga. That was in November of 1983! I remember loving upgrading from Prodigy to Compuserve and finally feeling as if I was a "real" Computer nerd.
Anna Kournikova was famous. No, no she never even won a major tournament but the Internet showed us all her bottom and your grandfather spent hours in his college library waiting literally up to 5 minutes for a picture to load just so he could see her. Yep, granpa was a perv. But damn she was hot. Also, grandpa used to use a site called mapquest. I would literally print out pages of maps and driving directions to keep in my car so I could get to unfamiliar places. GPS? -HA, when I was a kid there was no GPS. Now back to Anna Kournikova....
Ugh there was this one time last year where I was in an area with no GPS or cell phone coverage, while driving, and had to use a map like a god damn peasant from 16th century England.
mk, correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to shun using GPS in order to challenge yourself directionally. Either that or you have just gotten lost and been late a few times in the past.
I should mention that not having to use a GPS is a much more enjoyable experience and I don't use one unless I absolutely have to. Getting lost can be a good time if you're not in a hurry to get somewhere.
I'm hopeless with directions. While on vacation in Florida my dad called (they were on a dock and saw MANATEES and I'd been going on and on about how I wanted to see MOTHER FUCKING MANATEES, MERMAIDS OF THE OCEAN) and told me to walk to a place about 3 blocks from me. I had him repeat the directions, twice. I was pretty sure I knew where he was talking about...but I asked him to text me them, just to be sure. He scoffed, told me he wasn't doing that, and to just come. 15 minutes later I had indeed walked to the wrong place and was calling him back. To be fair, I had originally walked to the right place...but...yeah. I could get lost in a paper sack. GPS all the way.
Mapquest had an amusing quirk in Seattle. The Mercer Street offramp from I-5 South was " " in its internal lookup table. So it would tell you to take "The exit." The fact that there were nine other exits off I-5 South into downtown Seattle did not aid things. You definitely had an idea of who was reading a Mapquest printout, though.
Privacy settings today are the equivalent of pedestrian "Push to cross" buttons.
There was a guy in my dorm who had a couple keyboards. We bonded over synths. He was in Csci. I was not. The subject of theremins came up. I'd been attempting to build one; I had two sets of schematics and instructions, both by Bob Moog, both from Popular Electronics Magazine, one from the 50's, one from the early '60s. I'd been incapable of completing either because one of them required vacuum tubes that were impossible to find; the other required transistors that were impossible to find. He suggested we check "the web" for a better schematic. So we continued to talk while his 386 hammered the modem pool for a 2400 baud line. Eventually he got through - maybe 20 minutes later - and fired up Lynx. Some command-line magic and he'd managed to find some Theramin schematics. However, he was running Lynx (Lynx, PINE, Talk and MUDS - these were your choices), which meant we needed to walk across campus to the engineering tech building because it was the only one students could use that had two machines that would run Mosaic. So we get there, and we wait 20 minutes, and we log in, and we search, and the links don't load. They're broken. We have text, we have values, we have a parts list, but we have no schematic. My buddy is crestfallen and frustrated. "Hang on," I say, "That's a campus phone number. Why don't we just call him?" (back when you put your phone number on a web page) Thus, ten minutes later, I was standing in the dorm next to mine, a xeroxed copy of a "theramin" schematic in my hand, the product of an "internet search." Best part is that it wasn't even a theramin. It was an optical gate. Wave your hand in front of it and the oscillator makes a noise. No tone control, no volume control, but hey - it came from the internet. Probably contributed to my jaded attitude towards all things Web.
Way back (even before the internet), we used to get files like this one, print them on our crappy dot-matrix printers, step back and squint :
We didn't get to download any episode of any show at any moment in seconds like you whippersnappers can.. Yeah, a Bleach episode was 500 mb. Mom calling somebody? Download interrupted. Internet cut? Download interrupted. Your brother makes the dumb mistake of trying to download an episode of Naruto at the same time? Download interrupted. The downloads usually took 6 or 7 hours overnight. Computer fell asleep at any point overnight?? Download. Interrupted. NO TORRENTS WERE NOT A THING. God damn. Why did we even do that to ourselves? Bleach was garbage. Naruto was okay for two seasons maximum. The low byte speed struggle was real.
Man, I had forgotten about that shit. It was infuriating! I remember getting Xenogears ISOs sent to me by a friend over MSN messenger (at least I had broadband, this was around 2005), but it would crap out all the time, and there was no download resuming. It took so many fucking tries! AIM allowed you to resume, but being Norwegian I barely knew it existed.
I"ll mostly try to help them understand what life was like before the internet. edit: And what it was like to grow up in a house with a rotary dial phone, a tiny black and white TV that would only play what was being broadcast at that moment by one of the 6 or so television stations that existed in our area. That our only source of recorded music was a record player or the radio.
We were not allowed to watch TV until I was about, oh, 14? 13 maybe? I was in Middle School. Maybe that is why even today I don't own one and do not have a cable/TV package. It just does not interest me. No Cell phones so when we went out for fun in the summer we were free and unsupervised. But may god be with you if you were not in the house when the streetlights came on, else you got chores. LOTS of chores. Hell, for that matter we went outside and played and rode bike all over. When I was 15-16 we rode our bikes to the big parks, a 30 mile round trip. Good luck with that today, moms are raising their kids in a culture of fear and panic; they'd never let that go down now.
Good call, but sometimes even I have trouble remembering that time. Pre-cell phone is so hard to imagine. I remember when answering machines were a new phenomenon... barely.
I edited in some more stuff that will probably blow my kids mind in my comment. My family was always slow to adopt new technology. I didn't have a computer growing up, we were the last family around to get color TV or an answering machine. I only got a cell phone in the last 4 years. My grandparents grew up without indoor plumbing, central heat and electricity. The changes in their lifetime were breathtaking and it I'd say the changes in our lifetime have been breathtaking (yikes, we're only about halfway through it!) I marvel at the internet all the time. The combination of cell phones and mobile computing are amazing. If the only thing we got from the internet was Wikipedia the world would still be changed forever but it's so much more than that.
Early file sharing, if you didn't know a guy: trawling public ftp sites for directories named ... . I miss you, ftp.cdrom.com Early file sharing, if you did: Long nights copying files in 1.44 mb chunks from one ftp site to another at 14.4 kbps to keep your ratio up.
Well kiddies, you were asking why there's two phone lines coming into the house. We had a second phone line installed for the computers. Both those phone lines have been eaten by squirrels now. Of all the outlets in the house, only one is still working. All that blue cable in the basement? Oh, you saw where we drilled a hole in the basement wall to run the blue cable from the back of the house to the front? Right, and those other holes in the ceilings? Well that was before wireless. And that set of encyclopaedias. And all those reference books. Well, you know how granpa and I still like to do the Sunday New York Times Crossword Puzzle every week? When I was in school, we even used the encyclopaedia for school projects.
I'm old enough that I used encyclopedias in elementary school. I occasionally get a glimpse of one in the reference section of our library. Besides that, it's school-provided MacBooks and Wikipedia. I think I'm part of the last generation to use hardcover encyclopedias at all in my education. Kids in my old elementary school now have Chromebooks. Go figure.
I do remember how I wanted to download a picture of a dinosaur and my mom had to disconnect the telephone for like half an hour. We also had to pay for internet usage per hour and not per month. Oh and there was free music everywhere and you were able to download music videos (in super low quality) via right click on Yahoo search results.
I fell in love with Minitel when visiting France and upon return I had to spend a fortune on my 1200 baud modem to use Archie, usenet, FTP, Kermit, etc in order to upload and download uuencoded files from gopher sites. I sure do miss gopher and the civilized and occasionally erudite banter that went on. As this ars technica puts it, http won but gopher "tunnels" on: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/the-web-may-have-won-but-gopher-tunnels-on/
Here's a nice weberized gopher proxy loaded with great memories: http://gopherproxy.meulie.net/gopher.viste-family.net/
It was really fast before they had pictures on it downloading was like copying files.
Unless you wanted to get them ti your house then it took forever. But things that ran remotely zip zip zip