Just 15 years ago on a purely text-based IP far, far away...

[THE Hal E. Burton 9000]

The current old-school/raw html-&-hyperlink state of http://www.evamonkey.com/ reminds me of when I first logged on to "the world wide web".

I was about five or six when I first saw that now-ancient but then-state-of-the-art (publicly though, not privately, a la ARPANET/MILNET) Gopher (for you whipper-snappers and non-nerds out there, Gopher was essentially a distant and solely text-based predecessor to Google).

This thread is dedicated to those memories of when you first encountered the internet or a new technology like when the iPod first came out (or when the phonograph was first patented by Edison for old-timers like Tines! ).

[CorporalChaos]

boxy computers with DOS start-ups.

I'm not actually that old, but my parents tend to hesitate in updating their technology...

speaking of which, I have an old computer catalog with a description of a 60MB hard drive costing $1,400.

[BrikHaus]

I think I was around the age of 13 when we first hooked up to the web. That was in the bad ol' days of having to pay per hour of usage. :evil: I'm certainly glad times have changed in that regard. I do remember, however, this awesome day when we upgraded to a blazing fast 33.6 modem. Ah the memories.

[The Eva Monkey]

Being at home on dialup the last few days has really made me appreciate the minimalism of sites like Craigslist. I'm also glad I put the signature image policy into place. The forum pages don't take ages to load because of ginourmous images everywhere.

The blandness of the mainpage is only temporary, I assure you. I'm going to institute an actual design as I go through and reinstitute content.

[NAveryW]

I was so young that I really don't remember what the internet was like when I first started using it, other than that I believe that the first browser I used was Netscape. Here I am now using another of Mozilla's browsers, the infinitely better Firefawks.

In retrospect, I'm surprised my parents let me go online unsupervised at such an early age. I could have easily come across nudity. Which I did, but at that age I just thought nudity was funny and thought that everyone else thought nudity was funny, like poop. It wasn't until about fourth grade or so that I found out that nobody else thought nudity was funny; they thought it was gross. The boys still thought poop was funny, though... I can now say that, in the right circumstances, nudity and poop can both be funny, but NOT if used together.

Wait, what? Internet, right.

[BrikHaus]

nudity and poop can both be funny, but NOT if used together.

That's right, nudity and poop used together isn't funny, it's sexy.

[The Eva Monkey]

nudity and poop used together... it's sexy.

DO NOT WANT. VERY DO NOT WANT.

[Timesplitter 01]

Being at home on dialup the last few days has really made me appreciate the minimalism of sites like Craigslist. I'm also glad I put the signature image policy into place. The forum pages don't take ages to load because of ginourmous images everywhere.

The blandness of the mainpage is only temporary, I assure you. I'm going to institute an actual design as I go through and reinstitute content.

To be honest I have seen worse raw Html/hyperlink pages around. It good to see that Evamonkey.com is getting a revamp.

As you can probably see I havent been on much. I think we would both agree that Uni/work takes up a lot of a persons time.

Take your time with the revamp

[Hunter21]

I remember the old days of playing frogger/Wavy Navy/ Spy Hunter on my old Apple IIGS. I remember playing the original Warcratft and Warcraft 2 in DOS on my next computer. And I got introduced to the interweb in college by the way of really slow pron and the old MUDs on green screens. I used Netscape and the old Webcrawler.

[DatDude]

My first internet connection was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(ISP)]Prodigy

Man for the days of the 14.4 modem and the message board being all their was

[The Eva Monkey]

Anyone remember telnet chat rooms, and when the moderators were known as "wizards"?

[DatDude]

Nope that before my time

[Hunter21]

Anyone remember telnet chat rooms, and when the moderators were known as "wizards"?

Very much so

I even had a couple friends who were "Wizards." I used to make fun of them. :P

[Trigger's Elysium]

The first computer with internet I ever owned was a Windows 98, actually. But my first experience with computers was this old DOS based thing that I can't quite remember exactly what it was like; it was in my aunt's work and my old elementary school. No desktop like the ones we have today, but I liked it anyway. First experience on the INTERNET was on my cousin's 95 computer. The computer and the internet facinated me. I don't think i've been internetting as long as you guys, but I don't think I needed it, when I was young <_<

[Ornette]

I think the first real personal computer that I had was a Kaypro, 8088, 4Mhz, 5Mb drive. I had random hardware that I've collected with other geeks like an external 8inch floppy drive and a 300 baud modem. Back then, there was really nothing on the internet except for newsgroups, which can be accessed via a modem through compuserve or if someone local had a feed, via fidoNet. Around middle school I had installed WWIV on my computer and used the dedicated phone line to run my own BBS, which later I got connected as a fidoNet node so that all my friends could read and post to national message boards, that was expensive, a long distance call once every night to sync. The DOS that ran on the Kaypro wasn't even the MS one, I don't think. But it was eventually upgraded to MS-DOS, and later I tried out Windows, I think 2.0, the one where everything was ASCII, which I thought was complete shit compared to the command line and never used it again. Over the summers I'd go up to the University of Florida and use their workstations (HP Apollos running hpux), which were connected to the internet, to access newsgroups there. The web (specifically content served on port 80) hadn't been around until I went to college, which started out as a stupid little thing where people would put up pictures of themselves or internally used for info purposes but quickly exploded into a world wide phenomenon when every corporation decided they needed a "web presence". The first webbrowser I used was Lynx, a completely text based browser, which came out around the same time Mosaic did. I still use Lynx to this day. Emacs also has a webbrowser called w3 that you can use within the editor itself, and I think XEmacs even has w3 render images within the editor.

[drinian]

My first PC was also an 8088, made by Leading Edge. Ran DOS 2.11. It was a hand-me-down and somewhat obsolete, but the previous owner had upgraded it as much as was possible: 12" orange monochrome screen, 640k of ram (enough for anyone), and a 20 megabyte hard drive. When new, it was probably worth at least $3,000. I just had fun punching in GW-BASIC programs, which a grade schooler could understand somewhat without any explanation.

I've been fairly lucky to live in a forward-thinking county that started providing free dialup access to Gopherspace in the early 1990s, followed by text-only Web access. The first files I downloaded off the Web were transferred to my computer using the incredibly slow, but always reliable Kermit protocol.

By 1997, when I was in middle school, I had convinced my parents to pay for full PPP dialup through the library; of course, I was the only one in the family who could figure out how to connect using the then-necessary Trumpet Winsock. I took the spare hardware I had and installed Slackware a year or two later, using a stack of about forty floppy disks to transfer data. It's amazing what you can do with outdated equipment, sometimes. Back in those days, I used to read all the "For Dummies" books I could get my hands on. They seem to have gone far downhill in the intervening years.

My time in Gopherspace (which I still visit, occasionally) and Lynx made me appreciate the value of minimalist design. Make the information paramount; don't make the site a distraction. I think these forums are a pretty good balance.

It's been sad to see some of the specialized protocols, e.g. Usenet, fall by the wayside in favor of Web interfaces, which are by their nature limited in a lot of important ways. (On the other hand, using remote servers for apps makes them much more easy to access). The rise of firewalls and NAT hasn't helped matters, either. But on the whole, things are much better than they used to be -- it's been pretty amazing seeing a lot of the promise of the early PCs be fulfilled over the past seven or eight years, as the Internet has become the killer app that some people saw it would be twenty years ago or more.

Incidentally, there's a really neat documentary produced in 1990 (one year before the Web) called "Hyperland" that's hosted by Douglas Adams and Tom Baker:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5986674605676511466&q=hyperland&total=11&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

Talks a lot about the hypertext development that was going on at the time.