Online Services: The Internet Before the Internet

jfruh writes "The Slashdot readership is probably split pretty evenly into two groups. There are those for whom full-on Internet access has been available for their entire computer-using lives, and then there are those who wanted to use the Net from home before 1991, and who therefore had to use a BBS or an online service. Here's a tour of some of these services, including Prodigy, Compuserve, and of course AOL. This should be a nostalgic trip for the oldsters among us, and a history lesson for Gen Y readers."

How I first got introduced to the Internet

[Mickey06]

Back in time my dad didn't give me internet access, so I had to resort to offline things. However, that was all fine because I used to learn a lot from it. I used to do programming for a long time before Internet, and I am actually glad I did. It feels like the current generation is too obscured with useless things and even new programmers copy paste their code from searches performed on Google. It hardly teaches you anything. I used to read programming books and manuals that came with the tools. I actually had to walk to my friends place to download the latest XNA and Visual Studio. Now kids get it too easily. However, I do find my new internet access fascinating. My dad and I had a discussion and he gave me access. It gives a little nostalgic tear on my eye when I first time logged in to the Internet and made Facebook account so that I could chat with my friends. Good times there, folks.

Ah, BBSs

[black6host]

I ran one, great times. Blazing 300 baud modem. By the time I was done we were up to 56K. I could probably still tell you the connection speed based on the squawks during the initial connection session.

I'm still very nostalgic about those times as I was part of them, and contributed to them. My BBS was free, and wasn't half bad. Of course Fido Net really gave you that sense of being in communication with the rest of the world. Amazing stuff!

America Online

[PrimalChrome]

I remember when America Online was a BBS run by Rocky Rawlins in Birmingham, AL. He sold the name to some unheard of upstart company who offered him stock instead of cash. He took the $15k in cash. Oops.

Re:Oldster?

[Gr8Apes]

Egads, I'm not even an oldster, they're too young! I had to follow the link to remember a mention of LORD. And 14.4 modems were the 3rd or 4th upgrade for me, after having the wonderful experience of an new 300 baud modem. That would be after coding my first game, in assembly, on an Atari 800. We played things like Zork, Wizardry, Hack, and, heck, there was some star based game on DECs we used to play, although the name escapes me now. For that matter, there were an entire sequence of very popular Infocom games (I admit I still have them in a box upstairs) that I played, and the original D&D games in amazing 2 bit color (ok, perhaps only my graphics card was monochrome, I don't recall) But I do recall FIDONET as a new wondrous thing (hey, if we're mentioning BBS's, might as well mention the first networked system) OK, nostalgia satisfied, time to go back to my VCR and reel to reel.

Re:Third and fourth groups

[dbc]

Ahhh, yes.... the floor sort. Diagonal lines, good. And pranking people by collecting all the chad from the keypunches in the student keypunch area and... finding creative places to hide it.

Speaking of the floor sort, true confession time: I actually had a part time job as an "operator". Mainly feeding the card reader and filing output into pigeon holes. There was a punch card fed typesetting program that understood all the thesis requirements for margin and TOC and bibliography sites and such, and could to math and chemistry typesetting with weird escape sequences (all upper case, mind you). Think TeX, only punch-card oriented. It had one fairly serious design flaw, it pretty much insisted on reading all 80 columns of the card, so you couldn't use columns 73-80 for sequence numbers as was the usual for most programs in those days. We had a card sorter and operations would sort anyone's deck for free while-you-wait. But thesis decks were a no-go for sorting. Anyway, there was this one chemistry PhD student who's thesis deck was about 1 3/4 boxes of cards. I forget, is a box 8000 cards or there about? Anyway, he gave it to me one day. As I was loading the card reader with big fist-fulls of cards, I bumped my elbow on the reader and pretty much scattered to the wind about 1000 cards. As he silently watched I stopped the card reader, gathered all the loose cards and put them back in the box and said "Sorry." He didn't say a word -- amazing self control -- I think he was at the point of exploding. I saw him again about two weeks later -- he very quietly peeked around the door to see if it was my shift, saw me, and left. Never saw him again.

Re:How I first got introduced to the Internet

[Anonymous Coward]

You are correct about *dial-up* 9600 baud modems, but you could get leased line 9600 baud connections in the late 70's. I know, because my university also had one.

Re:Blast from the past

[LocalH]

Nope. It was LOAD"*",8,1 to load the most recently loaded file (or on first load, the first file on disk) at it's original load address. The reason you have to leave the ,1 off when fetching a directory with $ was that for backwards compatibility and code re-use, the drive sent a load address of $0401. This was fine on the PET and on a Vic-20 expanded with 3K RAM, but on the C64 $0400-$07FF is by default screen memory, and so LOAD "$",8,1 on a C64 will display the raw bytes as if it were screen code, which is incorrect. Leaving off the ,1 forces C64 BASIC to load it to normal BASIC RAM (located at $0801), so that you can then LIST it like a BASIC program.

Re:Ah, BBSs

[Dr. Evil]

There were plenty of paid ones.

Free for 30 minutes, pay for more access. Pay for file access and doors.

Telephone lines weren't free, and multitasking hardware was expensive too. There were lots which had access to echomail and basic doors access for free.

When you didn't have money, the trick was to have a giant list of telephone numbers on the wall so that you could program them all in your autodialer, then go read a book or something until one of the lines rang through to a modem. Then you could spend a night on a half dozen different boards.

Re:Third and fourth groups

[Zontar The Mindless]

McGrew is absolutely not wrong.

I can verify that CompuServe existed in 1983 because during that time I was eating lunch almost every day with the people who worked there.

Details: I worked for the same parent company (Sears) in 1983-84. At that time, they had two ops centres: one in Sioux Falls, SD, and the other in Jonesborough, TN. I worked for Sears Payment Systems (3rd-party CC processor) at the TN location, and the CompuServe group's cubes were right next to ours.

Enjoy the butt-hurt, bonehead.

Re:300 baud ... and counting

[JWSmythe]

    My first modem was 300 baud. It wasn't til those blazing fast 2400 baud modems came out, that a friend gave me an old 110 baud acoustic coupler.

    I still remember the claims about how each generation was "as fast as it will ever be". Nonsense about frequencies and capacity of the copper. I remember a rather heated discussion on FidoNet, about the fact that going faster than 2400 baud would melt phone lines, and as CPU speeds reached radio frequencies the interference would cripple all RF transmissions (TV, radio, and those "new" cordless phones). At the time, there was no cellular phone service in the area.

    I definitely can live without ever setting another init string to make some off-brand modem work properly. I used to have all the codes, and S registers of various manufacturers memorized. I love where we are now. "Plug it in. Your machine will get an IP via DHCP. You're done."

    I freaked someone out not long ago, because I whistled to a fax machine to make it connect. It was just a quick test, to see that the line worked. I can only get 2400 baud, but it's enough to say it connected, and throw an error. :) I used to be able to do 9600 baud to some modems.