I was at university just as residential networking was installed, so all of the students doing computer work would hang out in the room full of terminals and workstations. There was a single serial terminal on each residential floor for quick email sessions, but if you needed to get work done, you went over to the computer center. Some rooms had X Terminals, others more powerful workstations, and there were some large central hosts that had the licensed applications needed for some coursework. There would be a hundred people logged in at once. It was common for people to set up .plan files, use Unix "talk" to message each other, we had a local Usenet hierarchy in addition to the global one. People shared what they learned, experimented with early Gopher and Web, a natural community was formed.
Once the residences were wired, a lot of that culture went away.
I love hearing about these early forays in social media. Having been involved on BBSes in my youth there was a certain magic that hasn't been reproduced since, especially around that sweet spot of local, pseudo-anonymous networks - kind of like seeing the same crowd in a coffeeshop.
I read in college about the advent of city life in the 19th century where a new form of human interaction was explored, the "flaneur": someone a part of the urban crowd, but anonymous within it. Able to view on people's daily lives, but without being seen themselves. Wild to think that this was a new concept to people that had only know village/town living for generations. I feel early computer networks created something similar online, albeit briefly.
There have been a few networks that have tried to emulate what you're describing with regards to local pseudonymity (NextDoor being the first that comes to mind), but most of the audience for it just uses a local subreddit or Facebook group now. WhatsApp can also be an option, depending on the country you are in.
I'm really glad those of us who were around on these systems in the late 80s/early-90s are recording some of their experiences. It really was a wonderful period, when the Internet was small, and to some extent we felt like we were already living in the future. I find it hard to explain... but the character of the connected world was different in those days. The technical barriers were a great filter.
I know I was reading think pieces by the mid-90s that accused these early adopters of being unreasonable elitists, who were gatekeeping because they just happened to get there first, and should shut up and sit down instead of complaining about their clubhouse having all these new faces in it.
One of the things I've noticed in the last several years is that I seem to have more interactions online that leave me without any doubt in my mind that the other party is experiencing some manner of psychosis. You'd occasionally run into people like this on YouTube in the late-2000s and on Reddit in the early-2010s, but it had a certain novelty to it back then. Everyone had a story about into an argument with some crazy guy online. In the last couple of years, I'd say I see someone experiencing some sort of psychological crisis online more days than not. This hasn't had the kind of negative impact that SEO had on the Internet, but it certainly hasn't helped.
No-one wants to acknowledge it, but elitism works. Hanging out with a bunch of people who are better (on whatever metric you care to pick) is just a lot more pleasant than hanging out with the unwashed masses, as well as making you more productive etc..
Of course the flip side is that those who are excluded don't benefit, so I suspect it's all zero-sum or worse.
Of course there are a million things you can do and find and learn now, that you couldn't in the early 90s, and I'm glad for that part. The overall quality of the discourse today though... not so much.
The "unreasonable elitists" itself was a narrative spun by a law firm that made one of the first of what would eventually be called spam messages, in the form of BBS posts advertising their services to would-be immigrants to the United States looking to get into tech. They spammed their post to tons of BBS boards of varieties of topics, which often meant users of many of them were downloading that spam message many, many, many times, and because this was back when data was charged by the byte, they were paying for that privilege too. Naturally, they were pissed the hell off and crashed the law firm's servers with hatemail and harassment (rightfully so IMO.).
In turn the firm took to the public talking about these weird nerds and their "internet" and how it was the future of commerce, whether they liked it or not, and businesses had the right to free speech same as anyone, and that included the right to advertise.
IMHO, that's a canon event to when the Internet was destined to be ruined. As soon as the fucking salespeople got in, it was game over man.
Yes, I (a student at the time at a midwest USA university) remember being on a BITNET relay chat in the fall of 1989 chatting with a German university student while the Berlin Wall was falling down. To me that was magical - it was like having a teleporter and being "virtually" there instead of just watching the news on TV.
VMS did, in fact have finger back in those days, although it might have not been a stock utility. In Claremont, we had the advantage of having Ned Freed (inventor of MIME) on the computing staff at HMC, so we might have had a lot of innovative stuff that wasn’t yet universal. JANET did have a gateway to the rest of the world. On interesting thing is that JANET addresses were the inverse of contemporary domain naming, with the highest level part of the domain name appearing first (kind of appropriate for an island where they drive on the “wrong” side of the road). There was also a tendency to use really short names, so a friend/colleague at Imperial College was something like mc @ uk.ac.ic (which was always fun to say out loud).
Most of Europe was on a network (EARN) based on the IBM protocols that undergirded BITNET. Switzerland, Austria and Germany followed a stereotypically teutonic and highly rational system of assigning domain names where the first letter indicated the country (D=Germany, A=Austria, C=Switzerland), the next two letters were the region, then two letters for the institution and the last three characters identified the individual machine which was making the best of the situation where there were only eight characters available to identify each machine on the whole network with a flat namespace.
BITNET names were a bit more freewheeling, but often were going to be something like institute+machine type, so UICVM for the IBM mainframe at UIC, HMCVAX for the VAX at Harvey Mudd College, etc. There was a Bitnet protocol for real-time chat.
Most Unix machines eschewed the Bitnet protocols for UUCP which, at least initially, often required explicit hops from one machine to the next, so you might have to address an email to something like drofnats!caltech!jarthur!dhosek to get an email from Stanford to Harvey Mudd, although by the late 80s, only the most obscure corners of the Unix world required a path with an explicit path.
The first generation of the internet did a lot to hide the disparate networking protocols underlying ARPA vs BITNET vs JANET vs UUCP, etc. (EARN and BITNET, using the same protocol effectively acted as a single network at that time), which meant that it was no longer necessary to do things like include gateways in email addresses (WISCVM was one machine that I recall being on both ARPA and BITNET and was a common path to route email between the networks). If you look at old issues of TUGBoat from the 80s, you’ll often see lists of email paths authors would provide to make it easier to reach them including some communication protocols which are long gone like Telex.
> No really, we had this. On the Vax it was DEC$PHONE and allowed up to four (or was it five?) simultaneous participants in a real-time text chat channel. If you “phoned” someone using their account name on the system then a “ringing” text alert would appear in the middle of whatever else they were doing on their terminal. Awfully like getting @here alerts in Slack in the modern era.
Seems like an oversight not mentioning IRC in this section.
> Like DEC$PHONE you had talk I believe? Instant messenger but far more network friendly and so closer to what we think of today.
> Seems like an oversight not mentioning IRC in this section.
Fair. I never got much exposure to it. It definitely wasn't available to us at the Poly and then I somehow didn't try it afterwards despite being over-excited about all the other online stuff I encountered from then on.
So even though I see the influence of IRC in all sorts of places (and not least in Slack of course) I don't have much insight into what it was like back in the day.
Weirdly (?) this is the first time I've even heard of Zephyr, so TIL! Thanks!
Ergonomics were so-so. Definitely a risk of neck-strain from having the monitor a bit low. The keyboard was pleasant to use but required a lot more pressure than a modern chiclet laptop (I think the zenith of computer keyboards was actually the mid-period IBM Thinkpads well before Lenovo took over).
I too think it's pretty, but I come to it from a position of obvious bias. I picked one up cheap second hand in the early 2000s just for fun - but then I sold it a few years later as it took up alot of space in my then rather pokey London flat. If I got the opportunity again I'd probably get one (they're not easy to come by in Sweden afaik) but I'd stress about repairing it if something blew - high voltage stuff terrifies me.
I definitely like the aesthetic of it. It has a kind of neat "hacker" look to it, like simultaneously "high tech" but also kind of "scrapped together"?
After some short FIDO BBS tries I eventually settled on MAUSnet with posh Zyxel (19200baud, you 14k4 losers :)) and later Bitnet Relay and UUCP. IRC was "The New kid on the block" and crowded with beginners...
A really good read. I was a bit later to the party but, my God, it was better then.
But the reality of shareholder value and developers salaries had to come from somewhere, and here we are, the enshittification of the internet is upon us and you can’t even load a HTML document without being tracked, spammed and generally frustrated.
I do find the commercial corruption of some areas of computing frustrating - but there are still pools of tranquility if you choose to focus on them. I'm having some fun trying to self-curate an interesting set of people in my Mastodon feed for example - slow going but there's no hurry.
Then there are lots of interesting and/or quirky little projects on GitHub and elsewhere that I can try to steer my attention toward instead of the social-network noise.
I was at university just as residential networking was installed, so all of the students doing computer work would hang out in the room full of terminals and workstations. There was a single serial terminal on each residential floor for quick email sessions, but if you needed to get work done, you went over to the computer center. Some rooms had X Terminals, others more powerful workstations, and there were some large central hosts that had the licensed applications needed for some coursework. There would be a hundred people logged in at once. It was common for people to set up .plan files, use Unix "talk" to message each other, we had a local Usenet hierarchy in addition to the global one. People shared what they learned, experimented with early Gopher and Web, a natural community was formed.
Once the residences were wired, a lot of that culture went away.
I love hearing about these early forays in social media. Having been involved on BBSes in my youth there was a certain magic that hasn't been reproduced since, especially around that sweet spot of local, pseudo-anonymous networks - kind of like seeing the same crowd in a coffeeshop.
I read in college about the advent of city life in the 19th century where a new form of human interaction was explored, the "flaneur": someone a part of the urban crowd, but anonymous within it. Able to view on people's daily lives, but without being seen themselves. Wild to think that this was a new concept to people that had only know village/town living for generations. I feel early computer networks created something similar online, albeit briefly.
There have been a few networks that have tried to emulate what you're describing with regards to local pseudonymity (NextDoor being the first that comes to mind), but most of the audience for it just uses a local subreddit or Facebook group now. WhatsApp can also be an option, depending on the country you are in.
I'm really glad those of us who were around on these systems in the late 80s/early-90s are recording some of their experiences. It really was a wonderful period, when the Internet was small, and to some extent we felt like we were already living in the future. I find it hard to explain... but the character of the connected world was different in those days. The technical barriers were a great filter.
I know I was reading think pieces by the mid-90s that accused these early adopters of being unreasonable elitists, who were gatekeeping because they just happened to get there first, and should shut up and sit down instead of complaining about their clubhouse having all these new faces in it.
I'm gonna say it.
It was better before them.
One of the things I've noticed in the last several years is that I seem to have more interactions online that leave me without any doubt in my mind that the other party is experiencing some manner of psychosis. You'd occasionally run into people like this on YouTube in the late-2000s and on Reddit in the early-2010s, but it had a certain novelty to it back then. Everyone had a story about into an argument with some crazy guy online. In the last couple of years, I'd say I see someone experiencing some sort of psychological crisis online more days than not. This hasn't had the kind of negative impact that SEO had on the Internet, but it certainly hasn't helped.
Mike Corley is a name some ancient Brits might remember. I just checked and his website's gone. I hope he's ok - he'd be pretty old by now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
"Most of what you read on the Internet is written by insane people"
Present company included ofc
No-one wants to acknowledge it, but elitism works. Hanging out with a bunch of people who are better (on whatever metric you care to pick) is just a lot more pleasant than hanging out with the unwashed masses, as well as making you more productive etc..
Of course the flip side is that those who are excluded don't benefit, so I suspect it's all zero-sum or worse.
Of course there are a million things you can do and find and learn now, that you couldn't in the early 90s, and I'm glad for that part. The overall quality of the discourse today though... not so much.
Damn right it was.
The "unreasonable elitists" itself was a narrative spun by a law firm that made one of the first of what would eventually be called spam messages, in the form of BBS posts advertising their services to would-be immigrants to the United States looking to get into tech. They spammed their post to tons of BBS boards of varieties of topics, which often meant users of many of them were downloading that spam message many, many, many times, and because this was back when data was charged by the byte, they were paying for that privilege too. Naturally, they were pissed the hell off and crashed the law firm's servers with hatemail and harassment (rightfully so IMO.).
In turn the firm took to the public talking about these weird nerds and their "internet" and how it was the future of commerce, whether they liked it or not, and businesses had the right to free speech same as anyone, and that included the right to advertise.
IMHO, that's a canon event to when the Internet was destined to be ruined. As soon as the fucking salespeople got in, it was game over man.
Yes, I (a student at the time at a midwest USA university) remember being on a BITNET relay chat in the fall of 1989 chatting with a German university student while the Berlin Wall was falling down. To me that was magical - it was like having a teleporter and being "virtually" there instead of just watching the news on TV.
VMS did, in fact have finger back in those days, although it might have not been a stock utility. In Claremont, we had the advantage of having Ned Freed (inventor of MIME) on the computing staff at HMC, so we might have had a lot of innovative stuff that wasn’t yet universal. JANET did have a gateway to the rest of the world. On interesting thing is that JANET addresses were the inverse of contemporary domain naming, with the highest level part of the domain name appearing first (kind of appropriate for an island where they drive on the “wrong” side of the road). There was also a tendency to use really short names, so a friend/colleague at Imperial College was something like mc @ uk.ac.ic (which was always fun to say out loud).
Most of Europe was on a network (EARN) based on the IBM protocols that undergirded BITNET. Switzerland, Austria and Germany followed a stereotypically teutonic and highly rational system of assigning domain names where the first letter indicated the country (D=Germany, A=Austria, C=Switzerland), the next two letters were the region, then two letters for the institution and the last three characters identified the individual machine which was making the best of the situation where there were only eight characters available to identify each machine on the whole network with a flat namespace.
BITNET names were a bit more freewheeling, but often were going to be something like institute+machine type, so UICVM for the IBM mainframe at UIC, HMCVAX for the VAX at Harvey Mudd College, etc. There was a Bitnet protocol for real-time chat.
Most Unix machines eschewed the Bitnet protocols for UUCP which, at least initially, often required explicit hops from one machine to the next, so you might have to address an email to something like drofnats!caltech!jarthur!dhosek to get an email from Stanford to Harvey Mudd, although by the late 80s, only the most obscure corners of the Unix world required a path with an explicit path.
The first generation of the internet did a lot to hide the disparate networking protocols underlying ARPA vs BITNET vs JANET vs UUCP, etc. (EARN and BITNET, using the same protocol effectively acted as a single network at that time), which meant that it was no longer necessary to do things like include gateways in email addresses (WISCVM was one machine that I recall being on both ARPA and BITNET and was a common path to route email between the networks). If you look at old issues of TUGBoat from the 80s, you’ll often see lists of email paths authors would provide to make it easier to reach them including some communication protocols which are long gone like Telex.
Origin authentication was a little wobbly, as per the Spafford Spoof moscvax message https://web.archive.org/web/20200807015539/https://groups.go...
> No really, we had this. On the Vax it was DEC$PHONE and allowed up to four (or was it five?) simultaneous participants in a real-time text chat channel. If you “phoned” someone using their account name on the system then a “ringing” text alert would appear in the middle of whatever else they were doing on their terminal. Awfully like getting @here alerts in Slack in the modern era.
Seems like an oversight not mentioning IRC in this section.
> Like DEC$PHONE you had talk I believe? Instant messenger but far more network friendly and so closer to what we think of today.
We also had (still have...) Zephyr:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)
That's what we used primarily in the CS dept at my university in the early 90s and the tech staff were still using it at my first job in the late 90s.
> Seems like an oversight not mentioning IRC in this section.
Fair. I never got much exposure to it. It definitely wasn't available to us at the Poly and then I somehow didn't try it afterwards despite being over-excited about all the other online stuff I encountered from then on.
So even though I see the influence of IRC in all sorts of places (and not least in Slack of course) I don't have much insight into what it was like back in the day.
Weirdly (?) this is the first time I've even heard of Zephyr, so TIL! Thanks!
This old terminal hardware is just beautiful. Terribly unergonomic probably, but certainly nice to look at.
Ergonomics were so-so. Definitely a risk of neck-strain from having the monitor a bit low. The keyboard was pleasant to use but required a lot more pressure than a modern chiclet laptop (I think the zenith of computer keyboards was actually the mid-period IBM Thinkpads well before Lenovo took over).
I too think it's pretty, but I come to it from a position of obvious bias. I picked one up cheap second hand in the early 2000s just for fun - but then I sold it a few years later as it took up alot of space in my then rather pokey London flat. If I got the opportunity again I'd probably get one (they're not easy to come by in Sweden afaik) but I'd stress about repairing it if something blew - high voltage stuff terrifies me.
I definitely like the aesthetic of it. It has a kind of neat "hacker" look to it, like simultaneously "high tech" but also kind of "scrapped together"?
Liverpool 1 West Ham United 2
I see you ...
After some short FIDO BBS tries I eventually settled on MAUSnet with posh Zyxel (19200baud, you 14k4 losers :)) and later Bitnet Relay and UUCP. IRC was "The New kid on the block" and crowded with beginners...
A really good read. I was a bit later to the party but, my God, it was better then.
But the reality of shareholder value and developers salaries had to come from somewhere, and here we are, the enshittification of the internet is upon us and you can’t even load a HTML document without being tracked, spammed and generally frustrated.
Glad you enjoyed the read.
I do find the commercial corruption of some areas of computing frustrating - but there are still pools of tranquility if you choose to focus on them. I'm having some fun trying to self-curate an interesting set of people in my Mastodon feed for example - slow going but there's no hurry.
Then there are lots of interesting and/or quirky little projects on GitHub and elsewhere that I can try to steer my attention toward instead of the social-network noise.