Internet in the 1980's

[hellymedic]

The AUK Calendar has a 'quaint' appearance.
I like it...

[rafletcher]

Hmm, I can't put a finger on the date, but it must have been the late '80's/ early '90's when  I had a "Global Internet" connection at home, running a dial-up modem in a 386 tower system bought from Evesham Micro's in Evesham. I was working in Stratford-upon-Avon then, and living in Coventry. Later purchases were from IIRC "Star" computers in Rugby. I also recall installing Wordperfect from approximately 15 3.5" floppies.

Edit:  Must have been mid'90's as Wiki has Pipex as the first dial-up provider in 1992, with only 150 customers by 1993.

[Mr Larrington]

Anyone remember CIX and Ameol?

Oh yes!  A chum¹ from my Penniless Student Oaf era worked for them as a tech support guru, having as he did a physics degree.  I was surprised to see him pop up on the telly a couple of years ago as an "archaeological astronomer".

Before that I had dial-up access to work from a VT220 on the bedside table and used to muck about with JANET when I worked at City of London Poly in 1987-88.

1: rr otp will remember Mr S Banton

[ian]

I think my first modem was 28.8k (PCMCIA, only worked on Wednesdays. In June). We can probably be dated by our popped technological cherries. I've no doubt some of you were losing yours with a 300 baud analogue audio coupler. That, for the record, sounds so wrong. I remember dragging a telephone wire across my apartment to join my very first grown-up computer to the interwebs.

SuperJANET sounds like a very British superhero.

[mrcharly-YHT]

I was doing dial-in work using my brothers 300baud acoustic coupler - but via a single-floppy (No HD) Mac running a VT100 emulator so I could dial in to a VAX mini. That was back in the 80s.

Very early 90s I 'telecommuted' from York to London and did quite a lot of work with a super-powered 2400 modem. Worked for one company who used CIX as their 'office'. It was very efficient.

[Kim]

SuperJANET sounds like a very British superhero.

Fangirl's arch nemesis.

[Phil W]

We had a terminal behind two locked steel doors at school in 79. It was connected to the schools network from where you could hack away into other networks. Had a 2400 baud acoustic coupler so hacking wasn't a speedy affair. Green screen on an impossibly big crt terminal, cream in colour the casing I think. The rest of the computing was incoming Tandy TRS-80 to be followed a few years later when the BBC Micro was launched.  Computer magazines with code to type in, followed by pre loaded cassettes later on.

[Jaded]

Chatted to a main frame overnight in 74/75, then was on the BT Viewdata service (Prestel, just remembered) and its subset, Micronet 800 in '85. Then was on TelecomGold c '95 so had an email address then. Got my first domain name in '96 - from what I remember, that took over a week to set up.

I used Prestel for banking - Bank of Scotland had a terminal and service.

[SteveC]

Nobody has confessed to using Compuserve (yet).

OK, I will. Previous employer was doing work for a large California based company and they provided us with a Compuserve account for email.
This would have been early '90s. We should have gone for Demon as we were in Warrington, but trying to explain that to the Americans was beyond us at the time.

[Basil]

Chatted to a main frame overnight in 74/75, then was on the BT Viewdata service (Prestel, just remembered) and its subset, Micronet 800 in '85. Then was on TelecomGold c '95 so had an email address then. Got my first domain name in '96 - from what I remember, that took over a week to set up.

I used Prestel for banking - Bank of Scotland had a terminal and service.

Lighting co I was with got us on telecom gold in 1984.  I can be sure of the date as i remember announcing  birth of #1 son to L.A. office via email.

[drossall]

I was working for a professional society, and even we weren't allowed on the Internet, under the terms of JANET, until late 1994. We briefly had a gopher server, before going all-out with our first Web site.

Before that we used various closed supplier e-mail systems to communicate with customers. At least one of these first began to open up with X400 email addresses (scroll down for examples), which are somewhat harder to build from first principles than SMTP ones

I think it's hard to appreciate what the Inter-net is if you have never experienced nets that aren't Intered.

[Phil W]

We had internal email in the 80's. An external supplier or contact had to be setup in advance and you needed to be on the list approved to send / receive external. Now you mention it I remember x400 in some of the headers as email got converted between various formats when it came from external.

[David Martin]

SuperJANET sounds like a very British superhero.

In my field it may well refer to the Dame once called the Granny Weatherwax of Bioinformatics.

[David Martin]

I think it's hard to appreciate what the Inter-net is if you have never experienced nets that aren't Intered.

Cue the four yorkshiremen of the internet (and I don't include plusnet on that.)

[drossall]

Yup, I'm a Yorkshireman.

[ian]

I'm sure my brain made it up, but I swear the first time I discovered a usenet news reader and hit that post button (and I still can't stop myself) there was a warning along the lines of 'remember, the world* will read this and your posting will use billions of dollars of computer hardware, etc.' If it ever did exist, they should reinstate it. Especially on Twitter.

I utterly confess I only discovered the internet because my gf at the time lived in the US and I didn't and it was cheaper than telephone calls.

*all four hundred people who'd weren't computernerds.

[drossall]

... 'remember, the world* will read this...

We experimented with Webcasting meetings in the 1990s, when this was still very new. There was no expectation that "the world" would bother listening, but we wanted to make at least the sound available to anyone who couldn't get there (no-one really had enough bandwidth to make offering video worth the bother). In one meeting, the chairman repeatedly mentioned, all day, that we were trying this exciting experiment, only for one speaker in the afternoon to say, about an unofficial point that he was making, "Between you and me and these four walls..."

It was around that time that I was involved in Webcasting Tim Berners-Lee, which was something of an honour.

[David Martin]

We're not going back to the 'you can only post on this thread by telnet to port 25' challenge again are we?

[rr]

Anyone remember CIX and Ameol?

Oh yes!  A chum¹ from my Penniless Student Oaf era worked for them as a tech support guru, having as he did a physics degree.  I was surprised to see him pop up on the telly a couple of years ago as an "archaeological astronomer".

Before that I had dial-up access to work from a VT220 on the bedside table and used to muck about with JANET when I worked at City of London Poly in 1987-88.

1: rr otp will remember Mr S Banton

Indeed I do, interesting job title.

[contango]

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.)

9600bps modem? We don't all have such modern technology, you show-off

I remember the time I realised that if I could remember a full JANET address I could connect directly to another machine just by typing in a number. Cue endless efforts to score geek points by learning the JANET addresses of regularly accessed servers.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

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.   

Remember those annoying free AOL CD ROMs?  The ones tempting people onto the internet?   

They are now collectables, antiques, even. 

Most people threw out all those "50 Hours Free!" CD-ROMs that were everywhere in the 90s, but a select few collectors made it their mission to hoard hundreds or thousands of the discs.

Whilst converting the loft t'other day I found a large carrier bag full;D.  Almost certainly they are the ones that aren't worth anything   so I shall probably leave them there as a time capsule.

[robgul]

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.   

Remember those annoying free AOL CD ROMs?  The ones tempting people onto the internet?   

They are now collectables, antiques, even. 

Most people threw out all those "50 Hours Free!" CD-ROMs that were everywhere in the 90s, but a select few collectors made it their mission to hoard hundreds or thousands of the discs.

Whilst converting the loft t'other day I found a large carrier bag full;D.  Almost certainly they are the ones that aren't worth anything   so I shall probably leave them there as a time capsule.

I have still have a couple of CDs on my desk being used as coasters (they are actually glued to another CD underneath to give a bit more stability and coffee mug heat resistance) - one is for Microsoft MSN and the other is a Windows 95 promo CD from the cover of Computer Shopper August 1995.

Rob

[drossall]

Nobody has confessed to using Compuserve (yet).

I've still got a Compuserve address in active use. I'd forgotten that I originally got the account to communicate within that system (for work), and the SMTP address variant came later.

[Kim]

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.   

Remember those annoying free AOL CD ROMs?  The ones tempting people onto the internet?

I had a conversation with EldestCub about those.  He's reasonably geeky for a teenager, so has an understanding of dial-up even if he's never had to suffer it.  He was sceptical that AOL CDs were quite as prolific as they were, and didn't quite believe that some people managed to collect enough of them to make furniture out of.


On a related note: Barakta and I actually know an AOL user (quite possibly *the* AOL user).

[Mr Larrington]

On a related note: Barakta and I actually know an AOL user (quite possibly *the* AOL user).

My grate frends Mr Woolrich and Mr Green both still have AOL babbage-post addreses.