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Back in the old 300 baud days (seems as though that was 3 lifetimes ago now but it was only just over 40 years I guess), I was doing research via the internet long before it was ever opened up to the average person. It was simply a way for (mostly governmental agencies) to share their files with others without photocopying them and paying for postage. Never really occurred to me at the time though that it was going to a) look like this some day - especially the 'social' or commercial aspects or that it was b) mind blowing - at least in its infancy.
north
south
east
west
take all (or take x, where x is what you want to pick up)
look
unlock grate with keys
throw axe at dwarf
fill bottle
take bear
throw bear
xyzzy (in debris room)
plugh (in Y2 room)
plover (in plover room)
blast (in very final room)
If you search around on the internet, there are versions for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux out there.
OK, I'm just under 50, so keep that in mind for context. OP: If watching the first primitive video games in the 1970s with shock and awe, thinking maybe you're ten years older than me or so at-most, so demographically I'm not sure we're terribly "younger" than anyone on C-D. I won't retire for another decade or so, but hang out on this part of the forum to hear perspectives more from my dad and mom's era. Some of it is accumulated wisdom, other info hopelessly outdated, but almost all interesting.
I was ground-zero for Pong, guessing 1977, when a family friend had it from Coleco, Atari, or whatever it was. That family maxed the credit cards so the kids would have a "good Christmas" pretty much every year, I recall, including the latest gadgets. We played that for hours and hours, though the kids were older than me and it was always with my parents. Suprisingly interesting, for such a simple game, btw. But I was ten or less, and kids adapt very fast indeed: the unusual becomes normal quickly.
Couple years later was Atari, which needs little introduction. I was hooked. Best friend had it. My father wanted none of it. Well, it was his money and there was never a video game system in his house, so there you go.
Then it all hit arcades, in different flavors. I played lots of quarter video games from that Golden Age, oh yes. And was very good at several, one of those wunderkinds from back in the day.
Fast-forward to the Internet. At work as a professional, I was the guy ordering a 9600 baud modem for our group computer (yep, one for a team of c. 10) in 1991. We shared files with other offices, via FTP I'm pretty sure. I learned all that on my own, plus other fundamentals and more-advanced topics like the 640K barrier, Extended and Expanded memory, TSRs in the SysTray, etc, because I was interested. In retrospect, a CS degree would have served me well, though I learned that almost too late as an engineer and scientist instead. Taught myself COBOL and DOS, wasn't half-bad at UNIX shell-commands later on either.
Christmas 1993 I bought a 386/16, with something like 8 or 16 megabytes...not gigabytes...of RAM. Had something like a 28.8K baud modem (think in octets, people!), I want on dial-up SLIP account about that time and started on bulletin boards. That wasn't really "the Internet", though in the backbone I suppose it was. Spent a lot of time on TOTSE, Temple of the Screaming Electron in the Bay Area (where I lived), which is still around to this day (see: Wikipedia). I knew the founder casually, he was a sharp guy plus I hung out with some of his bomb-throwing anarchist buddies. Interesting group of anarchists, Libertarians, misfits, screwups, drop outs, twisted geniuses, etc. Did that into about 1994-5.
1994 into early 1995 was a banner year, I truly went on "the Internet" as Netscape 1.0 came out and I remember it very well indeed. That was a huge leap forward in terms of accessibility, cannot stress that enough, sort of the "magic" OP refers to. I ran it on Windows 3.1, then later on Windows 95 when that came out (and also changed everything). So, that's when "the Internet" as most of us know it came out. Obviously in different formats it was around far earlier, that was my first introduction in something familar to most.
To OP's point, I too joined AOL about 1994 and remember picking up a few girls in the very early iterations of online dating. It was only for the tech-savvy at that point, but that was OK: my kind of egghead girl, then. There were many, all remembered fondly. Hell, that continues to this day, when it's gone from "we don't talk about this" to no social stigma whatsoever for kids using Tinder, and us old folks using OkCupid, Plenty of Fish, Match, etc.
Became a wizard in all that...the tech... monetized it by moving to Redmond and working for them directly in 1998. The rest is history, I live and breath software and it's rather amazing to be on the leading edge of the major changes past eighteen years in-particular. It's speeding up, we're heading for some interesting social seismic changes next twenty years that are already visible in the proto-stages. Will comment on that another time, though thousands have already for those paying attention the way big data, surveillance, BI, and cybersecurity in-particular are going.
The Gold Rush mentality of the late 1990s was something to behold. Being in the middle, accepting a Dot.com job for a firm with a relatively flimsy premise/business plan, I would summarize thus: Man's Reach Often Exceeds his Grasp. Great ideas that were way, way too far ahead of their time. I'm surprised Amazon made it through, that was the best idea of the lot and they lost money for a very long time indeed before going into the black. Yahoo, well we know about that. AOL, ditto. Shall I go on and count the ways...amusing to see some of the dot.coms that busted in the Crash of '00 and Recession of '01 are back, now that their ideas can be truly monetized to a more-receptive audience.
Last thoughts, to the oldest of those on this part of the forum: my dad, in his late 70s and early 80s (when his number came up), could not really grasp any longer some of the concepts in tech that seemed like magic. Two examples: not needing to "print" much of anything, like photographs, and (related) cloud storage. Granted, this is fairly new stuff: cloud storage is only ramping up last seven or eight years. Too, tablets and big phones...or mini tablets a person can carry in a purse on pocket... are sweeping away "printouts" of many things, and the vast bulk of film camera companies are now in the dustbin of history. WiFi is ever more ubiquitous, meaning the Internet and Cloud storage will be accessible most places, most of the time. You can kiss big hard drives goodbye, next ten years or less, for home computers: pointless.
So, I do empathize with OP's statements about Poing appearing as "magical" and quite frankly, so far out of the frame of reference as to be incomprehensible. Cloud storage, to a lesser extend WiFi, and not needing to "print" squat were truly out-of-bounds/magic/sorcery to my dad. Hope that never happens to me, but...oh, I'm sure it will!
I'm hoping to go the way of my Dad in this regard. One of his last patents was related to touch screen enhancements germane to smart phones. This was a couple years before he passed away, so 2009ish.
Do you remember when we first got e-mail and every other e-mail was either from some polite Lagos Nigerian guy asking us for money or was an ad for some device to enlarge your penis? Do you remember they actually had to tell people not to respond to them?
I remember Pong but I remember playing Zork on my Commodore 64 around 1983 more. There was nothing visual. It was all typing and imagination. I loved that game.
I was a Netscape user in the 90s and I had 2 websites created with Frontpage. Now, I wouldn't know where to start.
We had a BBS in our house, too! My husband belonged to quite a few local BBSs, and I remember going to meet-ups. That was fun.
The really neat thing about the early bbs's was they were truely local. A lot of people started out using their real name. People would get together and could know each other in person. We had a syspos group and met to share about equiptment and policy and sometimes problem people, but we had a lunch together before the meeting.
It's different when the person your discussing with could easily be half a world away.
It was sad when the internet first got popular and message boards started to fade, but then, they appeared on a web based net and the difference is the customers are from the world.
What I don't miss about the old days is dialing and busy signel and dialing again and so on to get on your favorite local bbs. We were having mouse and rat problems, and I was in the office closing in on a half hour wait, and this big furry thing scurried out of hiding. Did I do anything? Of course not, given my brief moment to log in near.... No furry beast was going to mess that up.
Back when it was all phone and modem based the landline companies must have had a lot of work putting in extra lines.
Do you remember when we first got e-mail and every other e-mail was either from some polite Lagos Nigerian guy asking us for money or was an ad for some device to enlarge your penis? Do you remember they actually had to tell people not to respond to them?
I remember Pong but I remember playing Zork on my Commodore 64 around 1983 more. There was nothing visual. It was all typing and imagination. I loved that game.
I was a Netscape user in the 90s and I had 2 websites created with Frontpage. Now, I wouldn't know where to start.
I was never a huge game fan, but absolutely loved Cosmo. If someone had a version that worked today, I'd be playing it. I think we got at least two copies of the Nigerian letter... I still wonder how people fell for it.
My best love was the alt.creative.startrek forum of usenet. I met friends I still have there. I lost the manuscript of one story with a dead laptop, and managed to find it all in the stored messages of the forum. We had yearly awards for writing, and I got a few first places and some 2nd and 3rd. What was so amazing is it was user friendly. New people could expect someone to offer to review and edit and in the process we all got better. Of course I was Nightbird there too, and still have friends from that time.
There's a lot more out there now, but I think it was a friendlier place then.
Use to go through the local college card catalog to connect to the Internet before there were browsers. They had blocked access to non students but left the library open.
The really neat thing about the early bbs's was they were truely local. A lot of people started out using their real name. People would get together and could know each other in person. We had a syspos group and met to share about equiptment and policy and sometimes problem people, but we had a lunch together before the meeting.
It's different when the person your discussing with could easily be half a world away.
It was sad when the internet first got popular and message boards started to fade, but then, they appeared on a web based net and the difference is the customers are from the world.
What I don't miss about the old days is dialing and busy signel and dialing again and so on to get on your favorite local bbs. We were having mouse and rat problems, and I was in the office closing in on a half hour wait, and this big furry thing scurried out of hiding. Did I do anything? Of course not, given my brief moment to log in near.... No furry beast was going to mess that up.
Back when it was all phone and modem based the landline companies must have had a lot of work putting in extra lines.
I knew some people who were members of neighborhood bb's and half of them ended up leaving their wives/husbands for each other! Called themselves "Cyber Lovers" or CLs, for short. There was an entire message board for people like that at one time, on Delphi forums. Pretty interesting stories to be sure. One woman that I knew personally ended up switching around to about four different partners in a few years.
My family and friends hated me when I first got online because, of course, it was a dial up and my phone was ALWAYS busy. lol
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