Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Tech You've Come a Long Way, Internety
Posted by Anthony Hecht on Wed, May 27, 2009 at 4:38 PM
If you're like me—and I think that you are—you'll find this video to be completely awesome and it will fill you with weird nerdy nostalgia for the horrible past. It may also find you looking on eBay for old modems, and cursing yourself for throwing away so much fun shit over the years.
You may also—again, if you're like me—go around for a while saying, "Hi, I'm K.C., aka Phreakmonkey."
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2
You know, the flashing LEDs on your modem used to have meaning.
We used them to send coded messages to your brain to convince you to buy Fruit Loops.
We used them to send coded messages to your brain to convince you to buy Fruit Loops.
3
BBS's were the shit back in the day. 20 minutes to download a crappy greyscale gif of a topless woman with bikini bottoms.
6
That's awesome. My friend Tom back in the day could get a connection tone from a dial-up modem by hissing into a phone at the right frequency. He practiced it for days until he got a handshake. Yes, I used to play D&D with him.
9
That's even older than anything I've ever used. I first watched a modem connect in 1974, 150 baud.
11
oh i remember connecting to BBSs and Prodigy at 2400 bauds. The upgrading to 144. Then getting a new computer with 28.8K modem to connect to the Internet via an ISP back in 94. Yahoo was a very small site at the time and the WWW just debuted to the mainstream. Yahoo used to have a daily list of new web sites that would take at least a good hour or two to go through. Learning HTML back then opened up a lot of opportunities. and if you actually learned CGI and Java as it debuted, you could earn a lot of money creating scripts for forms. Porn sites were starting to pop up but most people got their porn and warez via the USENET newsgroups back then. IRC was the only way you could really chat. Gopher and Telnet were things people used. Lynx was confusing back them because it either referred to the Atari Lynx or the text-based web browser Lynx. Netscape kicked NCSA's Mosaic's ass but was mainly based of Mosaic. SGI and their graphic stations were forces that couldn't be reckoned with.
13
Oh yeah. "Shoeshine kit." That's the first thing I thought of.
Ah, but it is sweet. I had a blog in high school, 1999.
Ah, but it is sweet. I had a blog in high school, 1999.
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