I'm so old that the web was called "Gopher", and Google was called "archie", which indexed the filenames on anonymous FTP sites. Since most of the file were named with 8.3 conventions, it was pretty unclear what something was until you went there and downloaded it. I remember ftp.funet.fi having a lot of stuff, and it was pretty cool that you could download some stuff from the US government (I think I downloaded the budget one time for a student congress debate).
ftp.funet.fi still exists, by the way :) Downloading a Linux distro or something from funet used to be a common way to measure your connection speed in Finland because you could be pretty damn sure the other end isn't going to be a bottleneck!
I way pre-date the web, so I guess I'm older than the author. I typed my first line of code into a teletype terminal connected to an HP3000 mainframe at my high school in 197... something... 6 I think.
Also I kind of think we old people should shut up about the whole "blink of an eye" thing. I've been guilty of it myself. Of course time didn't go by in the blink of an eye: it went by 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour. And of course you can't remember it all so looking back it seems like the years flew by, which they didn't. So we go around trying to make younger people feel a sense of urgency that they don't really need. What we should be saying is: slow down, take your time, enjoy, think it through, there's plenty of time. Oh, and ignore that old guy in the corner checking the time every 30 seconds.
I endorse the "blink of an eye" thing. My guess is it probably depends on how your life went. For me, I always wanted a family. I was always told "don't rush it, don't worry. You'll meet someone". And in the blink of an eye I'm now ~60 and never did. Why? Because I followed their advice and didn't make enough effort. I kept thinking "there's always tomorrow" until there wasn't.
The point I tell my nephews is if you want to do something, do it now (or ASAP), because if you keep telling yourself "tomorrow" eventually tomorrow passes you by.
I've been 'designing' websites since about 1994, and I remember being very excited when the major browser(s) started supporting background images, so that my webpages didn't have to have the same flat-grey background that every other webpage in the world had at the time. I also made one of the first 'starfield' backgrounds, and was simultaneously thrilled and annoyed to see other people start using it on their webpages.
Oh, there was a neat way to create a starfield without background images: a dark background and then the content is set in a table with very small cells (where the main content uses colspan and rowspan to get a bigger cell). Some of the small cells can contain stars with transparent gifs. That way, some stars can even blink!
When I was a kid (in upper elementary school, around the same time period), I remember gleefully making star wars web pages with starfield backgrounds and light saber horizontal rules, and I wonder if I used one of yours
My first online post was in the 1980's, long before web browsers, on a mailing list called RISKS. I ended up meeting congressional staffers, Richard Stallman, and a host of other amazing characters as a result of posting on that list. I even had engineers at Fortune 500 companies track down my student office landline phone number and call me with questions about things I had posted. The net was a very different place back then.
RISKS was where anybody active in the emerging fields of computer security and the impact of computers on society met and exchanged ideas (the name RISKS came from risks of computers to society, and was moderated by a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute named Peter Neumann).
I'm sad for future historians of the Internet because it looks like the early days of the RISKS-FORUM Digest have been lost to network topology changes at Newcastle University and SRI. The earliest archives I could find just now went back to around 2000, but the heyday of the RISKS mailing list was actually back in the 1980's.
In the same (old) boat. I ran email and USENET over UUCP before I had IP access for Gopher. Such a long time ago. In my area Gopher was free for everyone with a modem because the local university did not authenticate dial-in connections.
I did a lot of Pascal programming on I think a CDC6300 (?) at the university. If you could get to a terminal you could submit a compile job and wait for the operator to hand out your printed output. The system was case-insensitive and some terminals were all uppercase (of course monochrome, I guess 80x24 or so). So even minor typos took like 20 minutes to be reported.
I recently got curious about running a PC from floppies and found out I could get an external USB 3.5" floppy drive and boot a (I think) 2013 or so Thinkpad into DOS 3.3, with some doing. Managed to edit Lotus 1-2-3 with DEBUG.COM to remove copy protection. Of course much useful info to do this was on the web.
That was nostalgia also, but the old days with the terminals and line printer output were really something.
I'm so old that when the (single, rotary dial) phone rang, you dropped everything and went to answer it. No answering machine, no caller ID and no junk calls. If it stopped ringing without being answered, you had no idea who was calling or why.
I'm so old that when you called a company on that phone, a human answered. Every time. And that human was used to dealing with humans, and empowered to help.
Heck, I'm so old that when the (single, rotary) phone rang "with the wrong ring pattern you left it alone because it was for the other party on the party line.
Computer? At school maybe, and you debugged in your head over a printout you took home with you.
I was taught programming using an obscure language called LOGO that allowed moving a cursor(aka turtle) to draw shapes algorithmically.
128MB of ram was considered decent and if you could afford to plug in another 128MB of ram, you'd be able to use Windows XP for an hour or so before it freezes your computer.
I'm so old I first accessed World Wide Web through email :)
Back in '96 I was browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service.
Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.idsoftware.com (Doom was big), which returned a gibberish of text to Juno's email client. It was an HTML file full of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)
I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.
Readit News
Also I kind of think we old people should shut up about the whole "blink of an eye" thing. I've been guilty of it myself. Of course time didn't go by in the blink of an eye: it went by 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour. And of course you can't remember it all so looking back it seems like the years flew by, which they didn't. So we go around trying to make younger people feel a sense of urgency that they don't really need. What we should be saying is: slow down, take your time, enjoy, think it through, there's plenty of time. Oh, and ignore that old guy in the corner checking the time every 30 seconds.
I endorse the "blink of an eye" thing. My guess is it probably depends on how your life went. For me, I always wanted a family. I was always told "don't rush it, don't worry. You'll meet someone". And in the blink of an eye I'm now ~60 and never did. Why? Because I followed their advice and didn't make enough effort. I kept thinking "there's always tomorrow" until there wasn't.
The point I tell my nephews is if you want to do something, do it now (or ASAP), because if you keep telling yourself "tomorrow" eventually tomorrow passes you by.
Found an example (though not surrounding content in this case): http://boom.shivas.se/natthimmel/natthimmel.htm
RISKS was where anybody active in the emerging fields of computer security and the impact of computers on society met and exchanged ideas (the name RISKS came from risks of computers to society, and was moderated by a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute named Peter Neumann).
I'm sad for future historians of the Internet because it looks like the early days of the RISKS-FORUM Digest have been lost to network topology changes at Newcastle University and SRI. The earliest archives I could find just now went back to around 2000, but the heyday of the RISKS mailing list was actually back in the 1980's.
That was nostalgia also, but the old days with the terminals and line printer output were really something.
I'm so old that when you called a company on that phone, a human answered. Every time. And that human was used to dealing with humans, and empowered to help.
Heck, I'm so old that when the (single, rotary) phone rang "with the wrong ring pattern you left it alone because it was for the other party on the party line.
Computer? At school maybe, and you debugged in your head over a printout you took home with you.
I was taught programming using an obscure language called LOGO that allowed moving a cursor(aka turtle) to draw shapes algorithmically.
128MB of ram was considered decent and if you could afford to plug in another 128MB of ram, you'd be able to use Windows XP for an hour or so before it freezes your computer.
Back in '96 I was browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service.
Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.idsoftware.com (Doom was big), which returned a gibberish of text to Juno's email client. It was an HTML file full of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)
I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.