For some odd reason, Paul Burgess picked up on the fact that I said yesterday that I'd "been online for a bit over 20 years," and requested that I write something up about that fact. I'm not sure why anyone would find that interesting, but what the heck.
I first used a modem in the early 1980s at what I'd have to call my first job, as a data entry clerk for a small regional Special Education cooperative. Every day, a few hours a day, I would come in to the office, sit down at a VT-52 terminal attached to a Hayes Smartmodem, and dial up to a mainframe in order to input insurance claim forms. If I got done early, I would sometimes play games on the mainframe such as Othello or Star Trek. I also occasionally cheated and dialed other numbers on the modem that it might connect to, though I can't recall that I ever got it to connect to much that was interesting. Argonne National Labs I called a few times, but could never get past their password system. (No, I wasn't really a hacker, I was just curious, and in those days such behavior wasn't illegal. They are now, though, and rightly should be.)
I finally got my own computer at home somewhere around the age of 17 or 18, which would have been around 1984 or 1985 or so, if I'm recalling correctly. It was called a "Wings West," basically a knockoff of the old Apple IIe. In fact, a quite illegal clone, as it turned out, and Apple eventually shut them down. Around that time, though, I'd been reading about Bulletin Board Services, or BBS systems, as we called them, so I resolved to buy a modem. I bough a Prometheus Promodem 2400 external, and was quite excited. In those days the standard modem speed was 1200 baud; the 2400s were new to the market, and Prometheus was the first to bring one out for an amazingly low under-$200 price tag. I suppose if anyone can find the history of when that particular modem hit the market, or when the very obscure "Wings West" Apple II clone was made before Apple shut them down, we could pinpoint the year I became independently online from my home and actually getting online to communicate with others. It was definitely somewhere in the mid-1980s, though. Certainly the dreaded Ronald Reagan was President, the Apple II was still a serious computer, and 2400 baud modems were the fastest you could buy: such blazing speeds as 9600 were still not available, and most people were still running either 300 baud or 1200 baud.
I used to call a lot of bulletin board systems and leave messages. Some of them were pirate systems where you could down load free, illegally-copied software. In those days, copy protection on floppy disks was typical, but "crackers," hackers who broke copy protection schemes were also common. Indeed, when the floppy booted, most "cracked warez" had screens created by the famous pirates who'd managed to defeat the copy protection, and often had the phone numbers for the BBS' that the pirates liked to hang out on. For the curious, you can see images of old pirated games' "crack" screens here. It brings back fun memories for me, although I don't, as a rule, like to use pirated software anymore. I was a teenager then, though, and didn't much think about these things, and the phenomenon was ubiquitous. Eventually, I became the Vice President and then President of a small computer club in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, and ran its bulletin board, the Apple Tree BBS, for a few years.
For the record, the Apple II was always my favorite computer. It died of course--Apple killed it, and my loyalty to them as a company died with it. I also learned from that that it's silly to fall in love with a computer, or with any product or brand name.
In 1988, I got a job as a Systems Operator and disk publications editor working for Tom Weishaar's company, Open-Apple. We had a contract to manage the Apple II RoundTables on GEnie, which was a competitor to Compuserve at the time. (And "RoundTable" was GEnie's word for what they call "Forums" on AOL and Compuserve today). Through a long series of events, I eventually wound up with the contract to run those and some other RoundTables on GEnie, before GEnie eventually folded up shop.
I was using internet email by the early 1990s. I finally got on the web, using NCSA Mosaic, a few years before the web became ubiquitous, around the time that Netscape was just starting up as a company. For a while I ran my own business, with my partners Gary Utter and Eric Mueller, doing online content development work for clients. Gary still hangs out in the comments here now and then. Eric we don't see much of these days, although he runs Themepark.com, amongst other things. We owned one of the first of the fabled "dot-coms," in fact, and went bust in part because we had the wrong business plan, wrong business model. The way you made money online was very different these days from the way we've learned how you make money today. I won't get into it, it's all fairly obscure stuff, but we were both ahead of our time for what we were doing, and ahead of the curve for learning the wrong ways to try to make money.
Still, I managed to stay self-employed for nearly 10 years, which is a lot longer than a lot of people manage it. In hindsight, I wish I knew then what I do now, or I'd probably still be at it.
The funny thing is that I used to be a minor technical guru, but by the mid-1990s I had lost all interest in computers. I used to be one of those gearheads who could rattle off all the latest stats and the hottest products coming out and give great advice on the best things to buy and where to go to get them and what the latest bleeding edge gadgetery coming down the pike was. I've worked as a bench tech, computer builder, and more. But today, in our house, we have two computers, and I couldn't tell you how much RAM, how big the hard drives, how fast the processors are, because I just don't care. That would have been unthinkable for me 10 years ago,. I used to program in a few different programming languages--mostly just as a hack, never serious, but enough to know my way around in assembly, BASIC, and macro scripting languages--but today, I utterly lack the interest or the energy to learn or use more than the most fundamental HTML tags.
Computers used to be all I thought about, all I wrote about. Now I can't imagine anything more boring than sitting around talking about computer hardware or the latest software. I'm far more interested in the way people use technology to enhance their lives, to collaborate, and to disseminate information. Especially to collaborate, since I'm increasingly convinced that collaboration and information sharing are the main benefit offered by computers and the internet.
Who knows? Maybe one day I'll even find a way to make a living off of this stuff again.
Dean, thank you very much. I do find that interesting.
My own hands-on exposure to computers began about 1979. I was in graduate school in math at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and I took several computer science courses. Writing programs in FORTRAN, C, PASCAL, and whatnot. I was aware that one could access other computers "out there," but I never got near anything like that, and didn't know anyone who did.
About 1985, a friend of mine got an IBM PC. Big ungainly thing, and it cost an arm and a leg. We used to fiddle around with it some.
I didn't get a computer of my own until the fall of 1989, when I picked up a Leading Edge Model D. I couldn't really afford it, but I needed it to write my dissertation on. It came with 512K of RAM, no mouse, no hard drive— just two 5¼" floppy drives. It ran at something like 7.16 MHz "turbo speed." MS-DOS 3.3. A glowing green Hercules monochrome monitor.
By this time I'd been hearing about bulletin boards and whatnot— never got online, due to the poverty of student life I simply couldn't afford it, though I did pick up Kermit somewhere and practiced with it, just in case. Actually my chief recreation with computers in those days was writing programs in Turbo PASCAL 3.0— picked up a manual, with compiler on a floppy disk, at a book sale.
In January 1998 a friend introduced me to the web on an old computer he had in his basement. He also introduced me to the Netscape browser, and signed me up for an e-mail account at Excite.com. From there on in, I was messing around on the Internet pretty regularly, either at the public library, or at the University of Wisconsin libraries (I was at this time back in Madison again for a while).
Finally got my IBM ThinkPad online in the summer of '99. And have spent or misspent endless hours over my keyboard since.
The old BBS days were sure grand. Very crude, but also very grand. I remember connecting at 300 Baud way back in the early 80's.
At that connection speed, you can actually read faster than the text is downloaded and displayed on the screen.
Even that long ago, the old BBS model was not that different than the newsgroups which are so popular now. (Or even blogs for that matter!)
I got my very own computer in 1988 or 1989... a Mac... and got online with AOL (although, it wasn't AOL at the time, it was their mac service that then merged with their PC service. Gosh, I forget the name now.) Anyhow, I "volunteered" for AOL in their chat rooms and soon got a job at Ziff Davis running their forums on CompuServe (actually it was their own private service called ZiffNet then ZDNet. There also was a companion service ZiffNet/Mac. We had lots of bulletin boards, dueled with Canopus, the big computing service on CompuServe. Had many an interesting dustup.) That was when 14,400 speed cost $22.80 an hour! Went to BBSCon in... where was it... Atlanta, Georgia? Went to Networld Interop, Comdex, etc. I, too, was into the latest technology. Watched the web grow and eat into our profits. (I remember when Netscape's browser was our number one download in our software library as shareware!) Watched Ziff Davis try to launch their competing online service called Interchange that imploded once the web hit. Watched CompuServe crumble under the AOL onslaught because it was seen as a cash cow and not as an innovative startup. (It was owned by a tax company.)
Started ZDU on the web, an online learning subscription service that only cost $4.95 a month. You could learn just about anything there, and a lot of cutting edge stuff! Left... saw ZDU morph into something unrecognizable with SmartPlanet and ElementK.
Anyhow, did lots of other stuff in the web space... but I do wish I had bought AOL stock at their IPO! (I could have!) And, like Dean, I am defintely out of the technology loop. I have a friend who still works at Ziff-Davis, and he is constantly amazed at how far I have fallen off of the technology track.
Katherine
I've been "online", in that defintition, since the grand old age of eight, posting on certain local BBSes under the handle "Fuzz-Fuzz." Yes, they were okayed by my parents first. Though I was really thrown for a loop when I was thirteen and mistaken for forty. It's my mom who's the real nut, though. She's had an online journal for nigh on six or seven years...
REA ALL CAT=1-20 TOP=ALL NOR, GEnie forever!
I guess most of us old timers s started on the Apple II's and got on BBS's. I used to dial up Case Western Reserve's FreeNet and discovered Usenet and still use it. Lousey place to BOLG though, Way too many folks flaming each other. It got overwhelming.
Ahhh the apple 2 series, I had a 2E, 2C, a couple of 2GS's which kicked ass.....
The main difference between blogs and previous online media is the essential soap-box quality of them. Out of it's predecessors it most resembles a moderated mailing list, in that you can't get shouted down against your will.
Even blogs without comments turned on can still have back and forth conversations via trackbacks, all without the trolls having nearly as good of a foot in the door as on usenet, various forums and the like.
It makes implementing "the solution to bad speech is more speech" far easier to do than previous online methods, which made it too easy for one miscreant to poison a forum
While I'm at it (yes, today is my day off, so I have plenty of time to waste), here's an article which includes a discussion of the role of the Leading Edge Model D in computer history.
And for anyone who wants to poke around in the now-moribund precincts of gopherspace (another one of my perverse tastes), here's the Floodgap gopher server. If, as may well be, your browser no longer supports the Gopher protocol, you can access gopherspace through the Floodgap public gopher proxy.
The West Wing name for some reason doesn't ring a bell, I just remember instead of an apple key it had a cherry key. How original, I wonder why Apple put them out of business?
I think the Prometheus Promodem 2400 was available around 1985 or 1986. I remember my phone bill shooting up to about $200 in a single month around that time. I'll always blame you for that Esmay!
I still remember sitting in front of my amber screen on my Apple IIe watching the counter increment by eights as I downloaded various programs via x-modem. Man, that was painful. Things have come an awful long way since then.
Damn, for the life of me I can't remember your "handle" back then. What was it again?
Old man Harris has got you beat in the ancient computers history department.
I bought my first IBM-PC in late 1981, along with a newly-introduced 2400 baud modem, a couple of expensive big 3-1/4" floppy disk drives, DOS 1.0, EasyWriter, VisiCalc, and a genuine IBM-PC Technical Reference (which still graces one of my shelves).
Had to teach myself all that I was going to do on that computer, including how to hook up to online information services such as Lockheed Dialog in order to do information searches for engineering firms around Madison, which is what I put this stuff together for, back 22 years ago.
Talking about putting oneself into business the hard way...
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
"Unicorn's Apprentice."
Man, I was weird when I was a kid. :-)