
ASK HN: Do you remember what it was like when you first used the internet - pwoods
I don't mean "when I used the internet, we didn't have mice, we had to click with our heads!" I mean do you remember the feeling in your chest as you discovered new things every day that blew you away as cool.  Like discovering that your home town has a web site or that you could "Post" on-line and talk to people.  Do you remember that feeling?  I think it's like a drug because ever since I've been looking for that again and the best we got today is news about things outside the internet... i.e. blogs.  Sites used to be about "Visit my Homepage" not they are "See the Celebrity news on my Blog".  Do you miss the old days?
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cpr
Whew, that would be in 1972, as a frosh at Harvard, back when there were about
20-30 hosts on the ARPANet (the precursor to today's Internet) in the whole
world.

I remember fondly telnet'ing from machine to machine (back then, most were
PDP-10's running TOPS-10 or TENEX, and all had open guest accounts), seeing
how many telnet sessions one could chain before something broke.

And I remember the first ARPANet mailing list, hosted at BBN (the inventors of
email), which was about (recursively enough) email clients and mailing lists.

I remember sitting at a TTY (physical teletype--no CRTs yet) next to the IMP
(the ARPANet node processor) late at night and getting calls from BBN to
reboot the IMP if it hung. We had high-speed 56Kb leased lines to MIT, BBN and
a few other local nodes!

FTP seemed like a miracle at the time, and we had access to a data store at
CCA down the street which had an IBM data cell, which could hold gigabytes
(which seemed infinite, given that our PDP-10 had 256K of 36-bit words and
maybe a few hundred MB of large disk storage).

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nuclear_eclipse
I certainly don't miss the days of Internet Exploder 3, or Geocities, or AOL
domination, or ....

I certainly _do_ miss the days before commercialization and marketization of
the internet, when sites were genuine repositories of information and not cash
grabs or click-thru whores, and you didn't get 100 times more spam in your
inbox than legitimate email even after the filtering....

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brk
I remember, but it wasn't as significant.

This is likely because I used (and at one point ran) BBS'. We had FIDONet,
CyberCrime net, Usenet gateways, phreaking, and other ways to communicate
internationally. The Internet just made it faster and more graphical and
allowed you to multitask.

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hbien
I remember it was a lot of fun. My friends and I were geeks and we had these
RPG clubs, where we pretend fight in AOL chat rooms.

It was like D&D, we all had a certain amount of health and used dice rolls to
attack.

Someone even made a whole program out of it based on Final Fantasy, that kept
track of health and automatically did dice rolls for you. It even had great
music clips to go along with it.

Oh man, those were great days. Making fan sites of Final Fantasy and other
games just for fun.

I'm glad my girlfriend doesn't read hacker news or she'd dump me.

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rsheridan6
That would have been about 1991. The web did not exist, or at least I wasn't
aware of it, and for me the internet = Usenet. I printed out copies of
something called The Terrorist's Handbook (
<http://www.capricorn.org/~akira/home/terror.html> ) and sold it for $5 at
school (and in 1991, this was perfectly acceptable behavior. It didn't even
occur to me that I could get in trouble for this). Mostly I read stuff like
this on alt.tasteless: <http://www.tocotox.net/bedtime/smut/beaver-and-mr-
ed.html> (Warning - do not click on that link)

But the internet didn't really make a big impression on me until I saw NCSA
Mosaic (precursor to Netscape) on a Sun workstation a few years later. I knew
the web would be huge.

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axod
I remember using the www at high school, you had to load up trumpet winsock,
as windows didn't support tcp natively. This would be about '94 or '95 I
believe. It was sort of cool, but at the time I was more into writing games in
assembly so I don't think it grabbed me then.

The thing that really blew my mind was in University I got into talkers -
chatrooms you visit by telnetting into them. Think the one I used to haunt was
"The village". I was just amazed at how cool that was and trying to figure out
how the hell it all worked and how you could write a server. I wanted to have
my own chatroom. For me that was so much more useful and clever than what at
the time were pretty static websites.

Now years later I sort of do with Mibbit ;)

~~~
brandnewlow
Hey. I'm at Drupal Camp Chicago right now, we're all using Mibbit to follow
the conference via IRC. Thanks for a useful product.
<http://drupalcampchicago.com/irc>

~~~
axod
Awesome :) Glad it's being used by people... You never know if people will use
it, or prefer to use some HyperMicroBloggingLocationAwareWidget ;)

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geuis
Ah, the days of the "local" freenet based out of Tallahassee. That was circa
1993-1994 for me. I was 14 in 94. We got our first actual computer with a
modem, a Macintosh Performa 635CD. 2400 baud dialup modem.

The first time I connected to an online service was fun. My cousin was over
and we had pooled our money($20) to buy the Internet Phone Book. Thick book
filled with several thousand websites. It came with a CD that offered dialup
access to a company in Portland. Obviously my mom had a problem with long
distance fees, so we ditched that before we started.

I had no software to actually do a connection, but my computer came with
Clarisworks. Clarisworks actually had a COM program built into it. I got the
number for the Tallahassee freenet from my local library. After a lot of trial
and error we were able to type in the right modem commands (ADTD... etc) and
it dialed up. Woot, we were "online"!

Pretty quickly we figured out about local BBS's. Spent most of 94 and into 95
on those. By this time had upgraded to an actual telnet client. One of the
BBS's also offered dialup PPP access. Finally got that working in late 94 and
was on the Internet itself finally. My cd from the Internet Phone Book had a
copy of Mosaic 1.0, so I installed that. Then we loaded our first webpage.
Forget what it was, but it took forevvvvver to load.

Spent a lot of time over the next couple years on BBS's, then MUDs, and a LOT
of time on IRC. As I upgraded modems over the next couple years access got a
bit faster. GlobalVillage modems FTW! My first exposure to firmware was when
my 28.8k GV modem was upgradable to 33.6 via a software update. Talk about me
being a newb and having _no_ idea how software could update hardware. =)

------
pavel_lishin
I remember realizing that I could use JavaScript to fake include()s so I
wouldn't have to update every page on my crappy middle school website.

~~~
fgimenez
That was an amazing hack if you didn't have the ability to use server side
includes with your crappy web host.

I can still remember the pain of writing document.write hundreds of times.

------
ambulatorybird
I first started using the internet back in '96. I think I was actually most
excited about being able to play Quake online. But getting e-mails was kind of
exciting, too -- as an actor in an AOL commercial said, it was like "getting a
present".

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unalone
* Making a web site when I was a wee tyke and being told not to mention my name, or my location, or my interests, because according to my father anything online would be used to stalk and kill you.

* Going on Newgrounds and being utterly awed; submitting something to Newgrounds and realizing that the people I fawned over were actually people.

* Going to my home town's message board and fearing for how incredibly stupid a lot of people sound online. Realizing that having a commanding voice online doesn't make you cool offline and vice versa.

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pasbesoin
Coming back from Europe in 87, to a small town in the Midwest, to realize that
I was now a few keystrokes away from Europe -- via BITNET.

SLEEPY, where are you? I still remember your text files.

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blender
I remember when it was conspicuous when a corporation included their website
addy in a commercial or in print or on the radio... now it is commonplace.

Cheers

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brlewis
I don't remember the first time. It was before the WWW existed. But I get that
feeling more often now than I did then. These are good times.

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zacharydanger
My first Internet connection was a 56k dial-up connection out of, and I kid
you not, "Bryan's Auto Supply" in the next town over. A quick Google search
found them again. <http://www.ebryans.com/>

More though, I remember the fist fights between my older brother and I for who
was going to get to use the connection.

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jaydub
I must have been 11 or so, and I remember having a brief instant message
exchange with Hoon Im, one of the founders of Electric Gravity (they made "The
Village", which Microsoft bought became the basis for what is now MSN Games).
I don't remember exactly what was said, but after the conversation I started
learning how to program. Good times

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shadytrees
1998: Yahoo was the hottest search engine around, getting Hotmail was a rite
of passage, Neopets was just about to become popular, and I was reading tech
news from this gray-on-black website that let me tick off which websites I
wanted to aggregate. (I miss that proto-RSS website.)

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okeumeni
I remember the cost, how expensive it was to use the internet; Stories of
people living in shacks while putting all their money to pay for the
connection. I do miss Netscape navigator.

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milkmanjr
_i remember when i ditched AOL in favor of free internet..

_ altavista was my preferred search engine.

*netzero, lycos, altavista were some of the people who offered free dial-up internet.

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timcederman
Further reflection -- <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=268307>

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brianm
Ah, gopher, newsgroups, and muds....

~~~
cmars232
On a vt220!

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jedc
I remember how much better Mosaic was than Gopher!

~~~
jedc
And I remember being somewhat fascinated by a coffee pot...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot>

------
jcapote
SEFLIN FreeNet baby.

------
simianstyle
Pokemon!

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sarvesh
Yes I do but didn't use WWW for a while. Before I used WWW I thought the Mouse
was a useless invention and GUI applications were slow and tedious. To be
honest I didn't think it would take of in this scale until the WWW. I
understood after struggling with my mouse for a while that this thing is great
invention, it will be useful for everybody not just developers.

