Internet in the 1980's

[Phil W]

This takes me back to the Internet of the 80's

http://textfiles.com/history/

[rusky]

If you want a flashback to the 90s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzbzMYhZgDM

[Feanor]

Heck, I recently had reason to look up Houston Randonneurs for contact details.
Looking at the source code, this was written MS Word and just published:

http://www.houstonrandonneurs.org/

Their sponsor ( A bike shop in Houston ) has this to offer.  10 points to the first person to find the actual address of the shop!

http://www.danielboonecycles.com/

Seriously, both of these websites look like they have been made by 10-year olds in a Computer Science class in 1980.
I reckon they are optimised for Nutscrape 2.0.

[Phil W]

Heck, I recently had reason to look up Houston Randonneurs for contact details.
Looking at the source code, this was written MS Word and just published:

http://www.houstonrandonneurs.org/

Their sponsor ( A bike shop in Houston ) has this to offer.  10 points to the first person to find the actual address of the shop!

http://www.danielboonecycles.com/

Seriously, both of these websites look like they have been made by 10-year olds in a Computer Science class.

Looks like Google groups is the new bulliren board!

[vorsprung]

I used the Internet in the late 80's

I worked at the Polytechnic of North East London (now the University of East London)  There was a pre-Internet X25 network between universities called Janet

I believe Janet network still exists in radically upgraded form and now forms the UK academic part of the Internet

The general idea was, in your office there was a thing called a terminal.  This was basically just a keyboard and screen which was connected to a mini computer elsewhere in the university via wires.  The terminal didn't run programs or anything.  The mini computer could be persuaded to connect to other bits of Janet

So basically to get onto the Internet I'd connect via Janet to a "gateway" to the US Internet that was in Edinburgh

This was an unofficial service but usually it worked

Once I was on the Internet in the US - there was no WWW - the grade A thing to connect to was another server that had a publicly accessible copy of Usenet News

[Phil W]

Ah yes Janet and connecting from gateway to gateway.

[LittleWheelsandBig]

I was only introduced to the internet in the early '90s. All good fun.

[David Martin]

First forays onto JANET and from there to the wider world in the summer of 1989. Connect via the terminal to a PAD and then via X25 to whichever of the Vaxen I was supposed to be working on. Coloured book protocols, reverse domain name lookups and bouncing through all sorts of networks. Dial up from home was via ULCC on 1200/75. ANyone remember Unaccess at ?Lancaster?

[Polar Bear]

I remember having access to the internet from home before we had it at work.   I worked for a bank at the time...   

Good old dial up.   

[Pingu]

Their sponsor ( A bike shop in Houston ) has this to offer.  10 points to the first person to find the actual address of the shop!

http://www.danielboonecycles.com/

Nothing flashing or scrolling 

[T42]

In Sunnyvale in 1987 I asked a programmer how he proposed to get updates to us in Stuttgart regularly. "We have this thing called the Internet...".  In Stuttgart we had one 'data phone' in the whole company (~80 people**) and a 1440 baud modem in a panzer-grade box.  We were delighted that stuff came through so quickly. Cheaper than FedEx, too.

Then in 2004 I asked a cable company if they provided Internet access as part of their bundle. Their response was "in Preuschdorf??? Not a chance".  They stopped short of asking why a bunch of sheep-shaggers needed the Internet, but only just.

Now the kids round here walk into lamp-posts just like everywhere else.

**and I once cooked chilli con carne for the lot of them

[citoyen]

If you want a flashback to the 90s

LOL. That didn't turn out quite how I was expecting!

[mrcharly-YHT]

Heck, I recently had reason to look up Houston Randonneurs for contact details.
Looking at the source code, this was written MS Word and just published:

http://www.houstonrandonneurs.org/

What makes it worse is that the person who did it works for BMC Software. So they did it at work, on a works machine and didn't know enough to strip out the company metadata before publishing to the web. 

[robgul]

In the 1980s there was Viewdata (or call it Videotex if you like - or Prestel was BT's brand) - it was just the WWW in an earlier incarnation!   Wikipedia sums it up :
======
Viewdata is a Videotex implementation. It is a type of information retrieval service in which a subscriber can access a remote database via a common carrier channel, request data and receive requested data on a video display over a separate channel. Samuel Fedida was credited as inventor of the system. Fedida had the idea for Viewdata in 1968. The first prototype became operational in 1974. The access, request and reception are usually via common carrier broadcast channels.
======

It was all pretty simple albeit with crude graphics (same as Teletext) but it worked - dial up from a dedicated terminal on the good old phone line and connect to your nearest local call node - then it interacted at 1200 one way and 75 the other way with central computers hosting the content.   Later on (about 1987 there were terminal emulation packages for early PCs)

Extensive use of the technology was in the travel trade for booking holidays, insurance industry for policy and mortgage quotes and the motor trade for sourcing and ordering parts.

In 1985 I set up and ran the whole viewdata set up for a large building society - selling, through the branch network,  insurance and mortgage products - all good fun.

So not a lot is new under the sun - Cern and Tim Berners-Lee "just" took the concept and improved the front-end with the browser we know today.

Rob

[Oaky]

The general idea was, in your office there was a thing called a terminal.  This was basically just a keyboard and screen which was connected to a mini computer elsewhere in the university via wires.

In my case, in the late 80s, a VT100 compatible (probably VT302 or similar) terminal in the Uni library connected to an Amdahl mainframe running the rather niche MTS operating system.

When I moved into an office (in 1990, IIRC), our terminal was a BBC model B with a terminal emulator ROM which could do either VT100 or Tektronik modes, connected to the VAX cluster downstairs.  I still remember my DECNet address (19681::MNO).

I remember clearly the wonders of Gopher, and, later, websites that ALL looked like the ones in the OP.  (I wasn't sure that the WWW stuff would ever catch on given that it only seemed to do what Gopher did!  )

[mrcharly-YHT]

Anyone remember CIX and Ameol?

[ian]

I remember when I first sent an email (probably about 1990), the address was huge because you had to include the relay (nfsnet?). It would have helped to have saved the text of the email in the editor before sending it, since all that effort meant I sent an empty email bouncing around the world. This lack of useful content became the template for the internet and my interactions with it.

[citoyen]

My first vicarious experience of the internet was reading about Compunet in C64 magazines in the mid-80s and wishing I could afford to buy the 'Brick' modem that was required to connect to it.

[Phil W]

The talk of terminals reminds me of when our terminals got replaced by PCs. Around 93 I think. No one had told us they were doing it. The userids weren't the same as we used for our mainframe login. The keyboards didn't have the enter key in the same place. They used t connectors which every time someone kicked a cable out meant the whole row lost their network connection. When we finally were able to login we spent further time remapping the keyboard in the emulation software to put the enter back where we were used to it being. We lost our 24 cmd keys to be replaced by 12 function keys. We went from flick a switch on a terminal and then login within seconds to go and make several cups of tea whilst the PC booted up. We weren't very productive for a while.

[Greenbank]

1992, doing my A-Levels, and I was sneaking into the various Cambridge University computer labs for Internet access. Easy to use a Linux boot/root disk so I didn't need any official login. I soon *ahem* got access to phx, one of the big mainframes (IBM 3084 I think) and had an email address I could use.

No real www then, most of the things downloaded were from USENET or ftp sites, and using gopher for finding things.

[essexian]

I used the Internet in the late 80's

I worked at the Polytechnic of North East London (now the University of East London)  There was a pre-Internet X25 network between universities called Janet

I believe Janet network still exists in radically upgraded form and now forms the UK academic part of the Internet

The general idea was, in your office there was a thing called a terminal.  This was basically just a keyboard and screen which was connected to a mini computer elsewhere in the university via wires.  The terminal didn't run programs or anything.  The mini computer could be persuaded to connect to other bits of Janet

So basically to get onto the Internet I'd connect via Janet to a "gateway" to the US Internet that was in Edinburgh

This was an unofficial service but usually it worked

Once I was on the Internet in the US - there was no WWW - the grade A thing to connect to was another server that had a publicly accessible copy of Usenet News

Brings back memories this!  Back in around 1979 or so, Steve,  SurryIan (I kid you not...there were loads of Ian's in my class so we got nicknames based upon the cricket teams we supported) and I would go behind the stage at school and connect with the computer at Southampton Uni using a system like this and run programmes for Astronomy class (yes, I did A Level Astronomy!) calculating planetary orbits. I remember one such programme produced a printout which ran on for hundreds of pages of computer paper. So much that indeed we were dragged in front of the Head to explain why we had used the schools years supply of paper!

[pcolbeck]

I believe Janet network still exists in radically upgraded form and now forms the UK academic part of the Internet

Indeed Janet does still exist. It was initially upgraded to Super Janet, we are now on SuperJanet6 with a 100Gbps backbone and 40Gbps interconnects. Its the major interconnect between the UK universities.

I did a small amount of work on Super Janet (cant remember which revision) back in the late 90s early 2000s supporting some of the Cisco switches used for the backbone.

[ian]

Oh, blessed amber text Wyse terminals. It's coming back to me now. Youth of today won't believe it. They think Henry VIIIth had a Facebook account.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Amber terminals . . . Posh buggers got those.

Nobody has confessed to using Compuserve (yet).

[Kim]

Nobody has confessed to using Compuserve (yet).

Paging barakta.  Barakta to the 9600bps courtesy modem, please.


(We had one of those amber terminals on top of our fridge until a couple of years ago.  The great thing about them was the boot time was about the same as the warm-up time of the CRT: Power on, <Ctrl-L>, IRC-on-the-fridge.)