Well that turned out for the best

I used to walk around with my pager($80 a year) and a roll of quarters so I could use the ubiquitous pay phones to call people back.

 

I remember figuring out that you could dial a number off the payphone at school, but if you didn't pay, the other end couldn't hear you, UNLESS, you smacked the lever the receiver hung on. You had like 3 seconds.

SMACK! "DADCANYOUPICKMEUPATTHESCHOOL"?*click*

 

you have received a collect call from "HEYMOMPRACTICEISOVER." Standard rates apply. To accept these charges and receive the call, press 1. To decline, press 2.

 

First computer was a Commodore 128, which happens to be sitting right next to me (although it's mostly decorative now, it's not plugged in). Taught myself BASIC by reading the manual (currently sitting on top of the monitor). Later got a subscription to Compute's Gazette which was a Commodore enthusiast magazine and that helped me learn a little assembly language (thanks Jim Butterfield). Got a portion of a letter I sent in to one of the columnists published in there when I was 12, which was neat. The Commodore had a surprisingly-advanced dial-up online service called QuantumLink which later started a PC-based service called America On-Line. It had forums, People Connection (chat rooms), interactive games (RabbitJack's casino, a graphical virtual casino where you played against others), a downloads/files area, and a variant of People Connection where you could play chiptunes out of a catalog while you chatted. I uploaded some games I wrote - mostly text adventures. Those were archived and I was able to find one of them and play it in emulation again a couple years ago. Turns out I had fat-fingered something and there was a bug that occurred very late in the game that prevented you from finishing it. Because that bothered me I ended up fixing the bug, so the game is now finish-able 30 years after its original publication. Sorry to all the players that got screwed by that.

While on Quantum-Link, I got to participate in arguably the first graphical MMORPG.

First got on the Internet in probably '91, back before the Web, on an early commercial ISP. Back then there weren't browsers or internet applications you ran on your own computer. Instead, you basically got an account on a UNIX system that you could dial into, and then you did everything on the command line. You downloaded files with FTP and browsed a text-based proto-Web with Gopher. Social media -like activity occurred on newsgroups and IRC. There were protocol-specific search engines; finding stuff on FTP sites was done with Archie. You searched Gopher with WAIS but it kinda sucked.

The Web appeared (for a broader array of people) in very late 1994, but really became a thing in 1995. That required a browser, which ran on your own computer rather than somebody else's UNIX computer. That required your computer to have a direct connection to the Internet. In the early days, that was a PPP (Point to Point Protocol) connection, which was a different kind of account than a UNIX shell account (and usually more expensive). You could run some software on your shell account to give you a faked/tunneled connection so you could use browsers with a shell account, but it was pretty unreliable and the connection hung frequently. I still have floppy disks somewhere with Mosaic 2.0alpha8 and Netscape 1.0.

The rest is pretty much history that you all took part in. I was having dinner with some academics, some of whom were influential in the development of the Internet, probably in 1999. The topic of everyone's favorite search engine came up (there was Yahoo!, HotBot, AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, InfoSeek). One of the guys said "I've been really enamored with this new one called Google...you go there and it's just their logo and a search box. Very minimalist. The search results seem really good." I went home and tried to find a search engine called Googol (because he only said, not spelled, the word) and there wasn't one. I finally found a link to Google.

 

That's a long post for a newb

 

Don't cite the deep magic to me, bitch.

I was there when it was written.

 

A lot of us are similar in age it seems. I had a lot of the same, however, I was the "cool" kid on the block because I signed up for whatever HughesNet was back then and had a CD burner. It was either 400 or 600Kb/s down and 56k up. The CD burner was like $400 for a 2X burner (I think).

It's amazing to think that it wasn't a given that a burned disc would completed successfully back then.

I actually miss Napster for the singular function that you could see the whole library from the person you were downloading from. Back then, I found bands years before they became famous. I'd actually love to find something like that again.