It's quite interesting for me to see this, because I had the privilege of being part of the University-ARPA systems before 1985, with SATNET at ucl-cs and even prior to that (albiet arms-length through an X.25 PAD connection).
pre-internet, a huge community of people lived in what John Quartermain called "the matrix" (although after the fact) -a mesh of UUCP mail and usenet-like services co-joined with BBS and BITNET, and non-internet stacks like the UK JANET systems, or INRIAs cyclades systems or Jacob Palme's DEC-10 communications network.
So this third-hand take on things from BBS is "foreign" to me much as somebody working in a power station might wonder at the folks in the town next door lighting by gas. We talked to each other, but it was a different space of engagement. I got mine for free, it was my job. I think I didn't realise my privilege until I finally got to an economy without time-charged local phone calls, because being online all-the-time was very hard in the UK under the 3 minute call tarrif model.
So my "introduction to the Internet" was directly experiental, living through the uplift to DNS from HOSTS.TXT, deploying software shipped on tape to drive network links which were too slow to be used to ship the code, UUCP (designed for a pre-internet store and forward world) being ported to run over IP so that existing investment in SMTP and USENET could persist.
I liked the early internet. WHOIS was a directory for users. You could pay for a printed copy of the phone directory. I keep a variant of my NIC handle for the needs of WHOIS records now, which have an entirely different purpose.
The idea of "what is the internet" as text files in a BBS is .. well it's entirely rational but I hadn't realized it's need. A bit of a TIL moment.
This one is cool, NSFNET traffic totals from just before commercial Internet took off. WWW usage is ranked #8, just barely above that of IRC: http://www.textfiles.com/internet/nfs494.hi
pre-internet, a huge community of people lived in what John Quartermain called "the matrix" (although after the fact) -a mesh of UUCP mail and usenet-like services co-joined with BBS and BITNET, and non-internet stacks like the UK JANET systems, or INRIAs cyclades systems or Jacob Palme's DEC-10 communications network.
So this third-hand take on things from BBS is "foreign" to me much as somebody working in a power station might wonder at the folks in the town next door lighting by gas. We talked to each other, but it was a different space of engagement. I got mine for free, it was my job. I think I didn't realise my privilege until I finally got to an economy without time-charged local phone calls, because being online all-the-time was very hard in the UK under the 3 minute call tarrif model.
So my "introduction to the Internet" was directly experiental, living through the uplift to DNS from HOSTS.TXT, deploying software shipped on tape to drive network links which were too slow to be used to ship the code, UUCP (designed for a pre-internet store and forward world) being ported to run over IP so that existing investment in SMTP and USENET could persist.
I liked the early internet. WHOIS was a directory for users. You could pay for a printed copy of the phone directory. I keep a variant of my NIC handle for the needs of WHOIS records now, which have an entirely different purpose.
The idea of "what is the internet" as text files in a BBS is .. well it's entirely rational but I hadn't realized it's need. A bit of a TIL moment.