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The Internet Books

Everything You Needed To Know About the Internet In May, 1994 168

harrymcc writes "On Saturday, I picked up a copy of a book called How To Use the Internet at a flea market. It was published in May, 1994, and is a fascinating snapshot of the state of the Net at that time — when you had to explain to people that it wasn't a good idea to say 'thank you' when issuing commands to a machine, and the World Wide Web was an alternative to Gopher that warranted only four pages of coverage towards the end of the book. I selected some choice excerpts and wrote about them over at TIME.com."
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Everything You Needed To Know About the Internet In May, 1994

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  • Poignant (Score:5, Informative)

    by Gumug ( 1005067 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:19PM (#44987577)
    FTA: E-mail: “Never forget that electronic mail is like a postcard. Many people can read it easily without your ever knowing it. In other words, do not say anything in an e-mail message which you would not say in public.”
    • Re:Poignant (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:02PM (#44987763)

      In many ways we get all up an arms about Governments and Corporations "spying" or "profiling your information" however the internet wasn't ever really meant for private information. It design doesn't make private information easy. Sure we have came up with encryption and other crazy hacks to try to make us more secure, we are still communicating on a public network, to systems that we shouldn't fully trust.

      Encryption and other privacy methods are akin to putting a lock on the door (Good enough to stop most casual attempts to poke around), often not enough to be rally secure, against any group that really wants to get it.

      Remember this fact if you are going to choose a SaaS or Cloud solution. Not that using such systems are Bad or Evil like RMS likes to claim, however if you are going to trust your information to an outside source, you better be sure that you could handle a breach.

      • Re:Poignant (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Tom ( 822 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @06:22PM (#44988119) Homepage Journal

        In many ways we get all up an arms about Governments and Corporations "spying" or "profiling your information" however the internet wasn't ever really meant for private information.

        Those two statements do not clash.

        Postcards are not meant for private information, either. But a government agency systematically intercepting and reading them would still run afoul of the wiretapping laws.

        Remember this fact if you are going to choose a SaaS or Cloud solution. Not that using such systems are Bad or Evil like RMS likes to claim, however if you are going to trust your information to an outside source, you better be sure that you could handle a breach.

        That depends entirely on your threat model and your own capabilities. For many small companies who can't afford to have any in-house security know-how, an outside service provider could actually reduce the probability of a breach.

        The problem with SaaS and Cloud solutions isn't that they are inherently less secure or anything like that. The real problem is the all-your-eggs-in-one-basket issue. If a major cloud provider ever has a serious breach, everyone has been breached, not just one unlucky target.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        In many ways we get all up an arms about Governments and Corporations "spying" or "profiling your information" however the internet wasn't ever really meant for private information.

        Non-sequitor. No matter the source or the means, a government or a corporation having such extensive knowledge about a group can and will use that information for abuse*.

        It design doesn't make private information easy. Sure we have came up with encryption and other crazy hacks to try to make us more secure, we are still communic

    • Re:Poignant (Score:5, Insightful)

      by bmo ( 77928 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:24PM (#44987859)

      FTA: E-mail: âoeNever forget that electronic mail is like a postcard.

      I said this the other day.

      It made people angry.

      So, like, whatever, man. If you don't want people reading your stuff, encrypt it. Not every country has the same laws. Not every country has the same 3 letter agencies. And just because it's not been revealed by Snowden's archive yet doesn't mean it's not happening.

      --
      BMO

    • by Haoie ( 1277294 )

      19 years later and people still haven't learnt that!

  • How quaint (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cold fjord ( 826450 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:23PM (#44987591)

    FTA:

    Online etiquette: “Flaming is generally frowned upon because it generates lots of articles that very few people want to read and wastes Usenet resources.”

    That horse made it out the door long ago. Entire websites and careers are built on that now.

    • Re:How quaint (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PPH ( 736903 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:55PM (#44987735)

      The phenomenon known as Eternal September [wikipedia.org] was new and little understood back in those days.

      • Re:How quaint (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Joining Yet Again ( 2992179 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:17PM (#44987831)

        Dammit, I can find The Warez Song [youtube.com], but not the AOL Song by the same guy. Although I did only spend 20 seconds looking.

        I got on the 'net in 1994, a few after before eternal September... although it was via Compuserve, and I didn't use direct PPP/SLIP access for another year. Then Demon Internet in 1996, and that was it.

        The 'net was SnR-wise so much better before ~1998 - mostly a place for geeks, nerds and business types hang out, and while it had a social element, it wasn't just bringing the bullshit of the real world onto the 'net, but it's own form of community. Now it's just an extension of the real world - and if I want that, I'll go outside, tyvm.

        • by Joining Yet Again ( 2992179 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:33PM (#44987881)

          And I just decided to transcribe the lyrics because I'm having a nostalgia attack now...

          Ah, I remember when this was first released!

          The day I got hooked up to the mighty Internet
          I was hooked into a world that I'd never forget
          Web sites, chat rooms, IRC and live video streams
          Online multimedia that looked like LSD dreams

          Then I got my hands on something called CuteFTP
          I was told that I could have what I wanted for free
          Went on to some guys FTP 1:4 ratio
          Upload my swap file and download Super Mario

          Then I heard of something called an MP3 player
          Had something to do with music, compression and layer
          I didn't give a damn about the facts given to me
          Just wanted to download songs without buying the CD

          Later I found Vivo movies compressed on the 'net
          Download one movie per night - as much as I could get
          Titanic took a couple more, but less for Wet & Wild
          It was like Christmas every day and I was a rich man's child

          Soon enough the downloads had to come straight back to me
          Turnd out it was the Feds who ran that awesome FTP
          Were setting up for all us online criminals
          They said, "Fuck free speech, it's corrupted our youth, it's all a load of bull!"

          One more game, one more app, one more serial, one more crack,
          Warez are the only thing for me
          One more game, one more app, one more serial, one more crack,
          Could someone give the crack for Duke 3D

          DCC's something IRC gives to everyone
          Need a crack for Paintshop Pro? in seconds download's done
          Stupid people buy domains with "warez" in the name
          When they're shut down I am pissed off but they're the ones to blame

          Quake II came down in Denmark two days before the USA
          But thanks to FTPing I had my copy in a day
          Unreal was just that - unreal on my bandwidth supply
          It took three weeks to get it, it sucked, I'm asking myself why

          Got a CD burner with just two uses in mind
          To download, copy and burn everything that I could find
          Sell the discs for friends for only seven bucks a pop
          Five bucks for the disc, two bucks for my time, seven bucks for Photoshop

          Pisses me off when I'm searching for something that's hard to find
          I find a link to get a copy but Netscape is blind
          Says "can't find file" or something lame which doesn't help me out
          But three days later I get it and it removes all my doubt

          Cops find out, it's the second time, this time I got to jail
          Not only am I broke, no PC, no warez, and my plan did fail
          Sittin' in the slammer gonna warez me a great big ginzu knife
          I'll be here for the next ten years - can I warez a wife?

          One more game...
          Could someone give the crack for Duke 3D
          So it doesn't need the CD

          One more game...
          Could someone give the crack for Duke 3D

          One more game...
          Could someone give the crack for Duke 3D
          All I want is something for free

      • Re:How quaint (Score:5, Informative)

        by cold fjord ( 826450 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @06:33PM (#44988177)

        The phenomenon known as Eternal September [wikipedia.org] was new and little understood back in those days.

        Though the ruin of Eternal September blotted out the sun in the memory of those who endured it, it is a relic of the Second Age of the internet.

        The First Age of the internet also saw its battles and flames, though they are now but a distant memory and few speak of them. A record of one of the notable battles follows:

        THE "GREAT RENAMING" [eff.org]

        In 1986-87, Usenet underwent a thoroughgoing shakeup and reorganization which has come to be known as the "Great Renaming." At its inception, Usenet had only top-level hierarchies, mod and net. This was later expanded by the addition of the "fa" groups as well as some domains with only local distribution. When a complete reorganization of Usenet was proposed, a massive and now-legendary "flame war" (online discussion/argument) commenced.

        The most significant flame war of Usenet history was over the "Great Renaming" when the seven main hierarchies {comp,misc,news,rec,sci,soc,talk} were created and the old groups {net,fa,mod} were all moved around. There was great gnashing of teeth as groups were sorted and tossed around and relegated to their polities. -- [Woodbury, 1992]

        more [eff.org]

    • by bmo ( 77928 )

      Entire websites and careers are built on that now.

      One wonders what happened to Trashcan Man after the invasion of rec.pets.cats by alt.tasteless.

      --
      BMO

  • by jtownatpunk.net ( 245670 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:25PM (#44987603)

    That's about the time I helped develop a "how to use the internet" class for my department at UCSB. In preparation, we rolled out a bunch of clients to our Mac workstations for usenet, gopher, talk, ftp, http (Mosaic, of course), etc. After the class, everyone went straight to Mosaic. I was pretty impressed that someone had found a bunch of Elvis sound clips and figured out how to play them within minutes. Then I was concerned for the amount of bandwidth they must have been sucking up. I believe our part of campus was sharing a T1 at the time...

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      In the days before DNS when you could download a hosts file that had all of the known IP addresses in it - well the public ones anyway.

    • by Creepy ( 93888 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @06:06PM (#44988023) Journal

      For me it was gradual...

      I probably didn't discover Mosaic until late 1994 and nobody had told me about it. I randomly downloaded and ran stuff from our ftp site, which had mirrors of stuff shared by most major universities. At first I was majorly disappointed to discover it was a web browser, having used a text based one in 1993 and pretty much scrap-heaped the technology (compared to gopher it was a huge leap back). Two things with Mosaic grabbed me, though - the content was graphical, and there was a View Source that showed how it was done. I was mildly intrigued, especially since the default page contained graphics. I created my own pages, adding more and more content and graphics using Photoshop, aligning pages with tables, and showing others how it was done. It was probably the only thing I did more than usenet while working my job, which was TA the worst shifts at the deadest labs because I was the noob. I usually got the 8 hour Saturday shifts, spending the first 4 on my homework and the rest trying not to go nuts from boredom.

      While Mosaic was neat, the Netscape beta utterly blew me away. I told my dad to buy Netscape stock when they went public. He didn't. He regretted it later. I would have told him to sell the second Microsoft announced they were releasing a competing browser, because no matter how bad IE 1.0 was, I had watched Microsoft destroy too many companies with bundling agreements with PC hardware companies where they would get Windows and Office for hundreds of dollars less with a bundle (and probably if they excluded competing products) and I knew Netscape was doomed (WordPerfect and Spyglass in particular - that last one was a real dick move... we'll pay you a royalty for every copy sold... gives away for free and absorbs the expense by upping the price of Windows, then insists it's NOT part of the operating system, then later when they have their own code, insists it IS part of the operating system). My prophecy proved correct.

      • by AK Marc ( 707885 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @07:38PM (#44988471)
        I used lynx. It was preferable because I could get on the terminals and be on T3 speeds. But with the GUIs, it went through a diffferent network, with greater constraints. So downloading something to the mainframe from my terminal account would get it on a computer fastest. From there, I'd FTP it to my PC.

        I had watched Microsoft destroy too many companies with bundling agreements with PC hardware companies

        I solidified my opinion of MS when they did a deal with Stack for DoubleSpace for DOS 6.0 based on Stack's IP they looked at but didn't buy, then screwed around with the lawsuit and bought part of Stack to help it go away.

  • Let us not forget (Score:4, Informative)

    by fred911 ( 83970 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:27PM (#44987613) Journal

    Archie and Veronica.

  • by PolygamousRanchKid ( 1290638 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:29PM (#44987637)

    The Internet uses YOU!

  • by twicepending ( 936496 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:38PM (#44987659) Homepage Journal
    "World Wide Web was an alternative to Gopher"
    Hang on while I look up World Wide Web on Gopherpedia [gopherpedia.com]
    • Oh my God, Gopherpedia is the coolest thing to catch my attention in years. This is awesome - truly a spectacular project.

      I used gophernet at Cornell back from '89 to about '93 and for some reason, retain a strange nostalgia for it.

  • Blast from the past (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rick Zeman ( 15628 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:44PM (#44987681)

    This article isn't quite as geeze-worthy as something earlier this week I'd mentioned: Fidonet!

    • Well, if we're going to mention things: HAM Radio. Packet Radio.

      Now, if we combine that with an utter disregard for the FCC's ban on unlicensed use of our own "family band" air waves for packet radio, and apply the Fidonet model, we can build a wireless Internet you only pay to access once (when you buy the radio).

      To the naysayers I have only two words: Cellphone Bills.

      • This. Internet access opportunities would be so much more varied if the amateur service were allowed to use particular spectrum allocations to develop with the same freedoms as the commercial services to which bandwidth is "auctioned" (as if the government has the right to *sell* bandwidth in the interests of private business!).

        Meanwhile, shortwave radio - the best method of global communication - is fucked thanks to interference by pretty much everything. Government-regulated centralised control of communi

      • by fred911 ( 83970 )

        I remember watching my packets FTP'ing UCSD to update NOS. A whole 300k download over a 300 baud, two meter link. It took a day, but never failed. My first wireless connectivity.

        • I remember watching my packets FTP'ing UCSD to update NOS. A whole 300k download over a 300 baud, two meter link. It took a day, but never failed. My first wireless connectivity.

          LOL, you win. My 300 baud connected to a mainframe and then that amazing thing called Compuserve. Imagine...getting tech support without having to spend hours on the phone! Woo hoo! No radio. And no carrier pigeon, either.

        • by dcw3 ( 649211 )

          Kids these days. No wireless for us geezers. We to use one of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler [wikipedia.org] Think it was 110 baud. We used it from my high school, between our three teletypes ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ASR-33_Teletype_terminal_IMG_1658.jpg [wikipedia.org] ), and a local community college for a BASIC programming class that was offered around '73-4. Whenever you saw a kid walking down the hall with punched paper tape wrapped around their fingers (most of us adopted a figure 8 pattern), y

    • by Alioth ( 221270 )

      I used to run a FidoNet node. 2:252/204.

      The NC of network 252 was still running his BBS until about 2006 or so (and was still NC of 252!)

  • Ahem... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by djupedal ( 584558 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @04:47PM (#44987697)
    You know what's even more fascinating? Being there when it happened instead of reading about it...
  • by ThatAblaze ( 1723456 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:00PM (#44987753)

    It's still not a good idea to say thank you to your machines. After all, if they start thinking they are our equals than the robot revolt is just one step closer.\

    It's far better to end every message with "screw you." That will show them.

    • by mysidia ( 191772 )

      It's still not a good idea to say thank you to your machines. After all, if they start thinking they are our equals than the robot revolt is just one step closer.

      It's a great way to keep robots in check. When designing an AI for robots; make sure that every single one of them has a craving to have human friends, companionship, and to be remembered and recognized as "important" or "special" in a positive way.

      Robots should not be designed to unionize, but to compete against each other for the att

      • Perhaps. If we learned anything from slavery it is that an artistic combination of respect and disdain is the most effective way to treat our robots. The privileged few should earn respect and the other robots should be forced to look on in envy.

      • It's a great way to keep robots in check. When designing an AI for robots; make sure that every single one of them has a craving to have human friends, companionship, and to be remembered and recognized as "important" or "special" in a positive way.

        Yeah, that sounds good, until a type has every single robot 'craving to have human fries'.

      • It's still not a good idea to say thank you to your machines. After all, if they start thinking they are our equals than the robot revolt is just one step closer.

        It's a great way to keep robots in check. When designing an AI for robots; make sure that every single one of them has a craving to have human friends, companionship, and to be remembered and recognized as "important" or "special" in a positive way.

        Robots should not be designed to unionize, but to compete against each other for the attention and positive recognition from humans.

        Perhaps there should be a 'Like' key added to all keyboards? "Yes, good boy, here's your like..."

    • The context of that advice in the book is about not needing to say please and thank you to a LISTSERV or similar mailing list. Ie, the subject line of "unsubscribe" to the correct address is enough to unsubscribe form a list, whereas a line like "please unsubscribe me thank you" might not work. (usually it would work but it's a bad idea for the user to think that a human being is on the other end reading the mail, otherwise the subject line might be even more unparseable)

  • by Ice Station Zebra ( 18124 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:10PM (#44987799) Homepage Journal

    Imagine if they were in charge of the internet. The horror the horror.

    • Eh, the communities on Compuserve were a lot more competent and well-mannered than almost everything the Internet has to offer.

      What the modern Internet offers is a lot of entertainment. And while we reminisce about being able to download complete hosts files, looking at most people's Internet usage, I'm sure the same would apply to them.

  • by aaaaaaargh! ( 1150173 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:16PM (#44987825)

    More advertisements, more crap, more trolls... apart from that, not much has changed on the WWW. I'd say the biggest useful change was Wikipedia. Oh, and perhaps you could say Facebook of today==AOL of the past.

  • by BlindRobin ( 768267 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:20PM (#44987847)

    Reaction of us wot were internetizens prior to the dubdubdubya
      Arrrggh I feel web crawler spiders all over my trunk...
      Wuhtevahamahtoodoo? CERN has crossed the moat and the curtain walls are breeched, The Rabble Have Entered and the a-poky-lips is up on us and buggering us like mad daemons under the sundered sky ohhhh woe
    Ohhh - pretty colours and such
    Not so bad
    ahhhhhh sokay.....

  • by wordsnyc ( 956034 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:23PM (#44987853) Homepage

    [posted as comment to article] I wrote a book for Random House in 1996 called "The Book Lover's Guide to the Internet." I spent the first half of the book explaining how the net worked and how to access it through AOL, CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, et al. I think I still have a press account on AOL, for what that's worth. Somewhere I even have a pc with Mosaic on it.

    I did an author appearance at a B&N in NYC in '97 that was covered by C-SPAN. First question from the audience was "Isn't it true that the government is watching everything you do online?" I think I answered, "Yeah, probably."

    [Actually, since it was the Village, the questions veered into computers and mind control a bit later on.]

  • by Creosote ( 33182 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @05:40PM (#44987907) Homepage

    Just pulled it off my shelf. "The Internet Companion" by Tracy LaQuey, introduction by Sen. Al Gore, Addison-Wesley 1993. Was one of the best general introductions in its day, and had a brief section on the WWW.

  • I had a friend who managed the network for Bechtel, set my BBS up to pull in usenet
    that many said it wasn't possible; my setup was his proof. He ended up going to The University
    of Colorado to study telecommunication; talking about getting in at the ground floor.

    The local book store had a book "The Internet "Complete Reference"" 1994 by Osborne.
    http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2868340-the-internet-complete-reference [goodreads.com]
    He kept pushed the book on me saying if I wanted to know about the Internet read that book, so I bought it.

    It's 817 pages "The World Wide Web, shortened to the Web" takes up pages 495 to 512 (17) intro:
    "Is an ambitious project whose goal is to offer simple, consistent interface to the vast resources of the Internet".

    It covers everything at that time. Just like anything there garbage and there's gold, this Osborne book it top notch.
    Such a keeper that obviously I have it in front of me for this post.

    • I'm looking at one I bought long ago "The Internet Directory" - by Eric Braun - Mailing Lists-200 pages, Newsgroups-75 pages, OPACS-75 pages, Archie Servers-3 pages, FTP-40 pages, Gopher-80 pages, WAIS-40 pages, WWW-2 pages.....
    • I recall some books of that era had lots of filler. Like pages full of brief descriptions of interesting URLs, FTP sites, and other resources, as if the author just did a brain dump.

    • I had a friend who managed the network for Bechtel, set my BBS up to pull in usenet that many said it wasn't possible; my setup was his proof.

      What year? Didn't many BBSes do this with (non-UNIX) implementations of the UUCP protocol? I also thought some FidoNET systems had gateways to Usenet (I saw a brief mention on the wikipedia article but not sure how long back that went).

      • I had a friend who managed the network for Bechtel, set my BBS up to pull in usenet that many said it wasn't possible; my setup was his proof.

        What year? Didn't many BBSes do this with (non-UNIX) implementations of the UUCP protocol? I also thought some FidoNET systems had gateways to Usenet (I saw a brief mention on the wikipedia article but not sure how long back that went).

        There were always gateways but at 10 a minute it was spendy, newsgroups weren't a priority for me
        I was a chat board (8 lines). I did use PC prusuit for my personal files http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/library/CONCEPTS/SERVICES/PCPURSUIT/ [bbsdocumentary.com]

        I ran an AmigA 3000, Cnet software and was part of the FidoNet. Cnet was getting ready for the Internet; we had a cookie file
        which was a text file of his wife's recipe for chocolate chip cookies, but a cookie file was required so he added one.
        FidoNet does connect to the Us

  • by Tom ( 822 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @06:17PM (#44988101) Homepage Journal

    Oh yes, memories.

    When I got on the Internet (don't remember the exact year, probably 1993), FTP was the major application and our Internet introduction at the university discouraged us from using WWW as it was a considered a pointless waste of precious resources (what are graphics good for if you are looking for information?).

    I remember having a bandwith quota of 1 MB national and 100 kB international IP traffic. Yes, international data traffic was expensive and so they metered it differently.

    • by Alioth ( 221270 )

      We never had quotas, but in 1994 our entire university was on a 64k link, which quickly got saturated.

      I also got most of the research papers I needed to read for my final year project via the internet, using the World Wide Web Worm search engine to find them. Most academic texts online were available for download as PostScript. Using the WWWW to find them was far quicker than spending hours in the library looking for similar stuff.

  • I have a small pocket guide to the *entire* WWW that mattered back then. I can't find it right now, but it's not much younger than this book. It's barely 200 pages and it covers "all the web sites of interest" and it predates web sites like geocities, google and such. It recommends to use a modern browser like Netscape and not Mosaic. It's fun to see that people still lived in a world where they used a paper guide to help them out in a digital world and the paper guide was actually relevant, pretty complete
  • by CohibaVancouver ( 864662 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @06:38PM (#44988205)
    Still remember the first "Web Page" I ever viewed - Back in the spring of 1994 I went to visit a friend of mine who was in grad school at UIUC and he fired up Mosaic to show me the latest "Doctor Fun" cartoon.
  • I have one that's called "Navigating the Internet".

    http://books.google.com/books/about/Navigating_the_internet.html?id=xh0-pXnRe6sC [google.com]

    Covers everything, ftp, gopher, veronica, archie, email, email_to_foo gateways, PGP, WAIS. The WWW is covered in two chapters, with the second focusing on the graphical web, total of 67 pages for both chapters. The authors said it had the potential to bring everything else under one easy to use umbrella as a swiss-army knife of the Internet.

    I think I first touched the internet

    • by Hatta ( 162192 )

      I think I first touched the internet in late 98 or early 99, at the computer lab of the local community college satellite campus. Found out about their machines when I dropped my wheelchair using mother at GED classes. If memory serves me correctly they were PII 233's with 32MB RAM running Netscape Communicator on WinNT. 4.0 Netscape would crash if you looked at it funny.

      Surprisingly, a machine of this vintage is still marginally functional on the internet. I have a P-II 266 running Windows 98 and Firefox

  • by illumnatLA ( 820383 ) on Sunday September 29, 2013 @10:23PM (#44989147) Homepage
    I had a thick paperback book called "The Internet Yellow Pages" which was sort of like a print version of the original version of Yahoo! (back before Yahoo was around I think). It categorized websites by subject in a handy desk reference format hehe.

    Here's the 1995 version on Amazon: New Riders' Official Internet Yellow Pages [amazon.com]
    • The internet was such a huge fad while also being completely mysterious. Everyone had heard of it and everyone wanted to get on it but not a lot of people outside of universities knew how. They heard it was a way to turn their dusty PC into something useful for more than Solitaire. So the books just cropped up and people would buy them hoping it would help them out.

  • Supported corporate (research/non commercial) Internet for a company starting around 1989. I did an entire presentation to one of our research groups using Mosaic and html pages with image maps and external links in 1992, because I didn't want to use PowerPoint.

    Was sitting in a meeting with our ISP, we were discussing the future of z39.50 and got involved ina a discussion regarding port mapping in TCP/IP. Someone said,
    "hey is anybody using port 411 for anything?"

    Marshall Rose jumped out of his seat and wen

  • by funkboy ( 71672 ) on Monday September 30, 2013 @04:10AM (#44990247) Homepage

    The definitive guide of the time was The Whole Internet User's Guide & Catalog [oreilly.com] by Ed Krol & published by O'Reilly. I still have a copy of the 2nd ed. on my bookshelf.

    Ed was one of the few folks that did the research himself without a pile of other authors' guides lying around as a reference. He had to as there weren't any. Plenty of other guides came after this one, but this was the one the clueful folks had.

  • I just realized... I haven't heard "flaming" as slang for writing a vitriolic e-mail/post for, what is it, a couple years now?
  • “Flaming is generally frowned upon because it generates lots of articles that very few people want to read and wastes Usenet resources.”

    I'm glad they saved all those resources so that my 50GB rip of World War Z is possible today.

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