What is so ancient only an Internet veteran can remember? | Hacker News Reader

What is so ancient only an Internet veteran can remember?

old.reddit.com

10 pointsBitAstronaut29 comments

Open articleView on HN

Bangpath email addresses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path

Munnari being the UUCP connection between Australia and the rest of the world, run by Robert Elz:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Robert_Elz

https://dif.vic.gov.au/editorial/4194-a/a-computer-server-an...

running Usenet news and people paying for newsgroups to subsidize the phone bill to Hawaii.

Dial up bulletin boards, connecting via FIDOnet, then slowly being absorbed into Usenet groups and mailing lists.

gopher servers, ftp servers, spam email, "endless September"...

I'm old :)

No batshit from our lovely governments. Nokia S40 or similar 2G phones with J2ME apps for surfing in OperaMini and chatting in Jimm, but not simultaneously. File sharing services like Rapidshare before torrents. A <table></table> was an only way for layout. Macromedia Flash was neat before it became a mess. Liberty Reserve in pre-Bitcoin era. Much slower computers which used to be much faster from user's point of view.

BTW I am not a true veteran, all of that you could see just 20 years ago.

> Macromedia Flash was

an amazing new vector-based animation technology called Future Splash that had nothing to do with Adobe or Macromedia.

UUCP style email addresses. JANET addresses being reversed compared to Internet/DNS. The web didn't exist. Anonymous FTP servers. Usenet before Eternal September. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

Using Archie to find files on anonymous FTP servers.

That just stirred a decades dormant memory of using ftpsearch.ntnu.no.

Establishing an internet connection with a local ISP manually by connecting to a modem via a serial terminal with a tty char device/com port, sending AT commands, logging in, and then starting a PPP session and mapping that to network interface. Also transferring files via ZMODEM.

FidoNet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet) was an eye opener for me.

While probably not "internet" by definition, it was a global network that allowed people to exchange information relatively free, with a couple days latency.

It had discussion groups much like Usenet, and I vividly remember dialing my local BBS every 30-60 minutes when waiting for a reply to a discussion :)

The rotten (dot) com parrot burned an image in my brain years before goatse's arrival. So much so, I think of that parrot perched on the disturbingly phallic Amazon logo every time I see it.

When the number of websites was so small a printed book could contain them all (and still be reasonably in-date for several months after printing).

Dialing for hours due to low number of modems on your ISP. Loosing your connection because someone in your house would pick up a phone receiver.

Going to someone else's house and seeing a 17" CRT monitor running in 800x600 resolution (no! don't change that! I like it that the letters are big!) and running Internet Explorer as the only browser, with the window half obscured by a stack of "toolbars".

Oh, you meant ancient? Using a borrowed userid to access a VAX at the university to browse Usenet and use FTP servers. No web or even gopher yet, so your guide was FTP directories published in Usenet. And a T1 link (1.5Mbps) was fast. From the university to the world that is. Your personal dialup was good if it was 2400bps.

SF LOVERS digest (started in 1979!)

https://archive.org/download/SFLoversDigestArchive

Here's another one. Asking a computer on the other side of the planet what time it is and getting an answer back immediately, in Japanese Standard Time. Whoa. This was on IBM's internal mainframe network when I was a co-op student there back in 1986/7. The world was a lot bigger place then. I still haven't quite gotten used to video calls with relatives on other continents being free and only a couple of finger taps to set up on your handheld device.

Kermit, world.std.com, wustl repository, IRC and netsplits, VAXen running BSD, Suns and SGI’s, …

And the excitement from Mosaic and watching coffee pots empty. Jennycam.

Rec.humor.funny

Knowing Louis Pouzin's work and role in the birth of the internet.

I'm not a veteran by far but I had - with very little merit - the honor to talk with him about that period.

Such a nice person. He knew had how important his work had been but as well that he was one among the tens of people who were keys to this collective achievement.

In respect to his own modesty, there is a link to the Internet pioneers' Wikipedia page - where his role is explained among all the other pioneers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_pioneers

Stolen "PCPursuit" and Telnet accounts, so long distance bills wouldn't be so bad. When "YMODEM" was a real improvement in information technology.

Telenet. :)

For the uninitiated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet

Another big one was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet

The reason some big online providers (some or all of, for example: AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy) had so many local access numbers (which was important since long-distance was so expensive) was that those numbers were actually Telenet / Tymnet, which the client used to connect to the service.

Connecting to the web via dial-up AOL looked (maybe still looks?) like:

Browser <-> HTTP(S) <-> (I forget this component) <-> AOL client <-> Modem <-> PSTN <-> X.25 <-> AOL backend <-> HTTP(S) <-> Website

Is the part that I’m forgetting SLIP/PPP? I forget how that was implemented in Windows… Possibly both the browser and the AOL client talked to that.

(That was all after you could use AOL for TCP/IP, which wasn’t always the case.)

Adding ATDT ATX3 to dialing scripts.

I couldn't quite dredge "Tymnet" back up, thanks.

AOL's seekrit superpower when they were "$CITYNAME Online" for several values of $CITY, as i was told, was that they ran on a big insurance company Stratus cluster as a slack time job and had access to both the compute time and the inbound X.25 for "free" for a while there.

The day the email came through that said they were switching arpanet to TCP/IP. I was 10 at the time.

I still have my CompuServe email address... and it works!

Coupler modems

Usenet

which I still use actually, peep my username :)

TTY-33 dial-up at 110 baud

300 baud modems.

you know what, movies are colourful now..

gopher

WAIS

Reply on news.ycombinator.com