10 Years of The Internet

[Vin DSL]

Interesting timeline, and insightful...

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ne...p?story=656282

I was a late bloomer - 1996 - but, to my credit, I saw the handwriting on the wall and switched my 80's vintage BBS from dial-up to the web...

[Vin DSL]

* Israeli company Mirabilis introduces instant messaging with its ICQ service. (1996)

Heh! My UIN is 1095241. How about you?

[Vin DSL]

* 87 per cent of the world's e-mail is spam. (2005)

[jason]

Heh! My UIN is 1095241. How about you?

Mine's even lower: 368449.

Cool article. I've just skimmed it, but it brought back some interresting memories...like when Amazon.com just sold books from a mainly text-only site and touted themseleves as "The Earth's Biggest Bookstore."

I got started on the Net from a text-only account through UMass' K-12 service in the mid 90's. My high school got its first 14.4k SLIP connection, for "real" connectivity (Netscape, etc.) in 1995, I think. I first got "broadband" in October or November of 1996 when my school activated their 10Mbps dorm network. (Shortly after that the school had to upgrade from a T-1 to a T-3, and later an OC-3.)

--Jason

[Rye Seronie Oh]

Heh! My UIN is 1095241. How about you?

145376556... I have a 9 digit one. I feel so young.

[Ron]

Mine was KNA-1189

Oh, we're not talking CB?

BBSs lol great fun! I had a machine with a built-in modem and an external modem on a serial port. I hacked a program called dcomplus (IIRC) and was able to create two "windows" and jump between them with a kb command. Freaked people out! They had their suspicions that two of my IDs were both me, but when they both happened to log on at the same time, everyone was convinced that Clark Kent was NOT Superman! LOL
Nobody had TWO modems, let alone two PCs in those days!

The start of the internet? Lessee, I used something called VideoTex in the very early 80's, that interactively delivered text based news on demand from many multiple and diverse sources at 300 baud. I had set up dedicated leased lines between businesses in the late 80's, and and used decnet as well to "talk" with and "mail" people all over the world.

So that would be: Surfing in the early 80's, IM and email in the late 80's.

BBSs also had a mail relay thing (I forget the name of the networks) where every 1,5,10,30,60 minutes or whatever, they'd all be dialing each other to swap any mail headed their way. Mail was routed by best possible route in terms of how many hops irrespective of the hop delay.

These, I think, were really the beginnings of the net, long before the DoD came up with the idea, in partnership with Al Gore.

IMHO

[Vin DSL]

Mine's even lower: 368449.

Yeah, I got into ICQ a little late - about the 6-month period. I was really disappointed I didn't get a < million uin. Oh, well! You snooze, you loose...

At the time, I wondered why the hell ppl needed ICQ when IRC was already out there, but someone talked me into it. Heh! Then, I tried to talk other ppl into it, and they thought the same thing. I remember it took a long time for ICQ to catch on - probably a year or two.

Remember all the paranoia/rumors about Mirabilis charging money to use ICQ? Everyone acted like the world was coming to an end. Kinda funny, when you consider that they thought ICQ was superfluous a few months prior...

[Vin DSL]

SLIP connection...

Hahahaha! OMG! Another flash from the past. Almost forgot about SLIP vs PPP...

[Vin DSL]

Mine was KNA-1189

Oh, we're not talking CB?

Talking about 'broadband'... wanna see what I ran for a CB base unit? 100 watts of the most beautiful modulation you ever heard...

[Ron]

Nice set up (if not entirely legal), and I note the d-104 mic, too.

I had a nice mobile Johnson SSB setup as a base station, running off a 12volt converter, mounted on top of a large speaker laying on it's back. lol Mickey mouse, all the way.

I did have the world's best omni antenna for the base. It was a Turner SK-22b (IIRC) and it had a strange appearence. The ground planes were drooped and it had a gamma matcher on the side, and the SWR ALWAYS came back at exactly 1.1 : 1 on every frequency and every cable attached. Very strange indeed. In trying to read up on it today for this post, I see that it may not have produced the most perfect omni pattern, but that didn't seem to bother me at the time.

I was gonna be a ham a one point in the mid-late 70's, but never could get the code quite up to 13WPM, and didn't want a novice license. I understand the code requirement is gone now, but then again right now so is the desire.

[Ron]

PS I have a really nice Hammarlund HQ 140
http://www.dxing.com/rx/hq140.htm

[Vin DSL]

I note the d-104 mic, too...

Yeah, I run TUG (amplified) D104's, for the most part. The only thing I do is mod the heads. Crystal heads sound the best, IMHO, but humidity kills them, so I replace the cartridge with a Radio Shack condenser element and pack the head with cotton to take up the extra space. For power, I take two unused sockets and run juice up the handle from the 9v battery in the base unit.

On regular CB's, I prefer Turner SuperSidekicks. Love that clipped tower-of-power sound, with a ping unit! I like a hint of reverb too, but never got into the echo thing...

[Vin DSL]

I was gonna be a ham a one point in the mid-late 70's, but never could get the code quite up to 13WPM, and didn't want a novice license. I understand the code requirement is gone now, but then again right now so is the desire.

I passed the writtens, all the way up to Extra. I guess I just like taking the tests, but HATED doing the code. It seemed so stupid! So, I stayed at Tech. I mostly do 2-meter anyway, so no big deal.

I need to check the code situation again. I heard they were going to do away with the code too. Ppl just aren't interested in code, and they're afraid HAMs are gonna start losing bands, if ppl don't use them, so...

I heard they're only going to have, like, three classes and no code requirement on any of them. That would be cool!

[jason]

Remember all the paranoia/rumors about Mirabilis charging money to use ICQ? Everyone acted like the world was coming to an end. Kinda funny, when you consider that they thought ICQ was superfluous a few months prior...

Yes, I remember those...

What happened to ICQ? I liken it to the Beta VCR--I find it far superior to AIM or any of the others, but no one uses ICQ anymore. (I remember chatting with Jag a few times on ICQ when I first started hosting here--he even had his UIN posted in his forum profile.)

There were two problems with ICQ as I see it (and maybe that's why it isn't so popular anymore). The original version of the software was pretty basic: you could send messages (even if the recipient was off line IIRC), have real-time chats, send files, things like that. There was no major eye candy and no special features. Later versions were loaded with new features (none of which I used, so I don't recall what they were) and lots of fancy graphics. I remember it slowed my old Pentium that I had in college way down.

The other problem was that with sequentially numbered UINs it was easy to spam people--no need to guess usernames. Now everyone gets spam from all of the services, so it doesn't really matter which you use, but I was getting ICQ spam before I was even getting much email spam.

--Jason

[Vin DSL]

What happened to ICQ?... no one uses ICQ anymore...

'We' still use it!

The 'hot setup' is to run 2003b build 3916, with the ad hack!

They still offer this version on the site, if that tells you anything...

http://www.icq.com/download/