Telehack Re-Creates the Internet of 25 Years Ago 204
saccade.com writes "Telehack.com has meticulously re-created the Internet as it appeared to a command line user over a quarter century ago. Drawing on material from Jason Scott's TextFiles.com, the text-only world of the 1980s appears right in your browser. If you want to show somebody what the Arpanet looked like (you didn't call it the "Internet" until the late '80s) this is it. Using the 'finger' command and seeing familiar names from decades ago (some, sadly, ghosts now) sends a chill down your spine."
It is sad .... (Score:2)
... that I felt right at home.
Me too. It makes me realize (Score:3)
that I am no longer of the "current technological generation" but am in fact a couple generations back.
Yes, I remember updating my office location, hours, and plan for finger-ers and actually miss that—somehow it all felt so much more personal to me than Facebook does today. That is, I suppose, how you know that time has passed you buy.
fingerd * 30 years == facebook (Score:2)
Never used finger, either.
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Back in those days, hacking directly on binaries was common, macroassemblers were for wimps, and all data communications were carried out on mag tapes carried via sneakernet, which was usually faster than our suitcase-sized 300-baud modem.
Yeah, I remember those days. You could sit at your supposed 300 baud modem, start typing and wait for the server to catch up, and you weren't even a very good typist.
I also remember having "talk", the precursor to IM and a companion to finger. After all, you fingered the person before you'd talk to them... just to be sure they were there.
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Nothing wrong with being nostalgic or enjoying an experience for the memories of good times it brings, this is why there is a market for classic cars, among other things. These days you have pretty much the same sorts of people doing pretty much the same sorts of things, just using a different interface, same as it ever was. I wouldn't say time has passed you by.
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Me too... but it was the most fun I've had all day!
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...my lawn...get off it...etc... (Score:2)
While it is geeky and kinda cool the appeal is limited. Anyone who isn't already familiar with this will not understand what is going on at all. Anyone who is already familiar won't be impressed.
I hate to piss on parades as I appreciate and encourage anything like this...maybe I'm just getting old.
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While it is geeky and kinda cool the appeal is limited. Anyone who isn't already familiar with this will not understand what is going on at all. Anyone who is already familiar won't be impressed.
I think you shouldn't be so quick to assume that others will be equally disinterested. I was born around the time things might have looked like this and I found it plenty interesting. It was interesting to see how much basic familiarity with the Ubuntu command line helped despite it being "bad Unix".
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Hopefully the real ARPANET was a bit more scalable (Score:2)
And just like that, the Internet is dead
Nicely done! (Score:2)
Very nice reproduction, it's scary that I could actually get around on it. I just had to see if I could still write an old-fashioned BASIC program. Worked like a charm.
In those days, it was just us nerds who used computers. We just HAD to show everybody our little secret, didn't we! Now EVERYBODY's on the Internet!
Re:Nicely done! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty much the sad story I love to tell, and since you asked for it (or at least I'll pretend you did), so you now get to hear it.
'twas the age when life was good for geeks. Universities built us a huge, world spanning network and we loved what we saw. We went and built ourselves a cute garden, where we made our claims and planted wonderful flowers and trees to enjoy, no need for fences or barbed wire because, hey, we WANTED to invite each other over to have a look at what we did with our little turf on the 'net. Come in, and if you enjoy my creation, here's a sapling for you to plant in your garden, no worries, it's free. Sure, there was that occasional bully, but in general we were pretty nifty and knowledgeable gardeners and knew how to beat them with our shovels and rakes. And the occasional gopher didn't bother us too much. Actually, it was a cute little critter! And of course, in some corners of our garden, we planted our special herbs and spices, complete with a camo net. Sure, everyone knew what's growing there but hey, nobody really cared. And if you needed some to relax, just go and take some, there's plenty.
We looked at what we built and said that it's beautiful, too beautiful to be just for us, we wanted the world to participate and enjoy that beauty too! We decided it would be unfair to keep the others, who are no gardeners, out of it. After all, you don't need to be a gardener to enjoy the sight, sound and smell of our creations, these people, too, should enjoy our roses and relax in the shadows of our trees. We went and built paths through our garden, we cut bushes and made it pleasurable and non-intimidating even to those that were kinda wary of this "jungle". We created safe roads for them so they don't have to climb over bushes but so they could see all there is for them to see. We probably shouldn't have shown them the field with the camo net, but hey, they too wanted some weed, and it just wouldn't have been fair to keep it away from them. Yeah, they just took and didn't plant, but hey, there was plenty to go about. And those that were too stupid to stay on the path or too eager to be troublemakers were even easier to deal with than those gardeners that did the same, since these people were even more clueless.
The whole mess started to fall down on us when two things happened. Once, some of those idiots had to brag about our camo patches and how they got some really good dope for free in here. That's when the real world started to muscle in and tell us that we can't do that. Ok, we rebuilt it, made the herb fields smaller and less obvious, but sadly we also made the mistake to tell everyone how to still get there. Talk about learning from a mistake, but that's the geek, if he builds something nice, he thinks that everyone should benefit from it. Sadly, that's not the way most people think.
Especially not corporations, who first wondered where all their consumer sheeple went and, realizing that they went to our garden, decided that this cannot be. There is a place where sheeple flock to, run by technically and not legally inclined people? Their appetite for our nice little garden awoke. They came with big building machines, evicted some of us on the pretense that they now own our turf and build some amusement park on it, fenced off and only accepting those that paid their fee. We looked at it with contempt, since it violated everything we wanted from our garden. You couldn't even go there and take a sapling from their trees, they'd rather uproot and destroy it rather than giving it to you, anathema to the geek ideals. Worse, they took your saplings, grew them and then called the park cops, claiming that you stole your tree from them, not the other way 'round.
More and more of them came, and less and less we could build our gardens the way we wanted to. Worse, often enough, we couldn't even build our gardens at all anymore. We were swindled out of our turfs, and better not even dream about building a camo patch, the park rangers are sniffing them out faster than you could grow them.
I think it's time to move on and build a new garden. And this time, we should maybe not let anyone in but people we know.
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Just yesterday I was musing about the need to create new application protocol, possibly with a Lisp based text interface, with no Flash, JS, ads, ecommerce, sort of like hypertext vector Fidonet.
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I think it's time to move on and build a new garden. And this time, we should maybe not let anyone in but people we know.
Please do, I get the feeling this will be your typical win-win situation. I for one will make sure I'll stay off your lawn.
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And that's where your fantasy diverges from reality - and you don't even realize it. They built that network for *their* purposes, not yours. You forgot that the grou
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Very nice reproduction, it's scary that I could actually get around on it. I just had to see if I could still write an old-fashioned BASIC program. Worked like a charm.
I was recently looking for a basic interpreter for Linux, they are not as easy to find as I had hoped. I found basic256 but that is more similar to VB than BASIC. Happily, this reproduction run BASIC very similar to what I had on the old Commodore.
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FreeBASIC [freebasic.net]. It's a compiler though, not an interpreter, which is much better because you can distribute binaries. I've used it to whip up little internet applications that as an .exe are a lot easier for end users than a .pl or .php. If you want an IDE, try fbedit [cherrytree.at], which is of course written in FreeBASIC.
Now EVERYBODY's on the Internet! (Score:2)
Ya, and its ruined. ( no, that wasn't sarcasm )
PS, real men coded in 8bit assembler, but ill give you a pass on it since your heart is in the right place at least.
Even the ability to handle load is simulated! (Score:2)
It seems to be getting Slashdotted, the site isn't consistently responding for me. Oh, and while paging through the finger results on my first connect I got this (for realsies):
"operator: Slashdotted..367 users, holy shit"
Found myself! (Score:3, Funny)
If I could only get a message through to my past self....
I think it would be:
"Forget the Amiga and Commodore! Buy all Apple stock you can! Hold through the lows! Sell just before the Mayan calendar ends!"
I miss Usenet the most. (Score:3)
Please, someone recreate the golden days.
Re:I miss Usenet the most. (Score:4, Insightful)
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The Usenet is still there, nothing has changed. Just a lack of users, so get an account somewhere (news.eternal-september.org maybe) and help to get it back up...
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Aside from the historical and entertainment value, I've actually found old Usenet posts useful... I've found specs and configuration info on old hardware, howtos on old software and other great insight on numerous occasions.
Also, it's nice to remember when The Internet knew how to spell, use apostrophes and assemble sentences within some form of grammar.
*sighs at those Gen Y kids*
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Also, it's nice to remember when The Internet knew how to spell, use apostrophes and assemble sentences within some form of grammar.
That's because getting on the Internet required a license: you had to be employable in high tech or pass college admissions.
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Usenet is still there, but it's less decent-quality articles and more binaries and spam these days.
You can still get the classic text-mode clients too, like slrn or tin or trn. I'm a slrn user myself, came to Usenet relatively late in the game in the late '90s. Initially used lynx on Usenet, which worked fairly well with a couple major limitations: no threading and the built-in editor didn't do line-wrapping.
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I used to say that google's caching of Usenet was a great service to all of mankind.
Now I really wish they hadn't. The ability to dig through the archives (from a historical standpoint) is amazing, but what "google groups" has been doing to Usenet in the present is... sad.
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Golden? It sort of works but it's a bag of shit. They actually took the interface from DejaNews and made it worse, which is quite an achievement.
Simpler (Score:4, Insightful)
I like the days of yore better. Computers were simpler then. The software, the hardware, the protocols, all of it.
Back then it was possible to understand everything that was going on in your system, and there is something very beautiful about that. You could know how every command worked and how it did it, down the the binary data it was sending down the serial port if you wanted. Now, even though I know what seems like an encyclopedic amount of information about computers, there are large gaps in my knowledge where I either know nothing or I have only a general idea of whats going on.
Then again I can now play Angry Birds on Chrome so that kinda sooths the nostalgia.
Re:Simpler (Score:4, Interesting)
And a bit farther back it was possible to fix a computer yourself (*really* fix it, not just swap out a CPU or motherboard) - I remember helping to troubleshoot an old DEC PDP-10 [wikipedia.org] (still alive way after its time) with a voltmeter - much of the logic was on wirewrapped cards. You could see the bug fixes because they were in different colored wires. I even had to enter the bootloader on the front panel register switches (just enough to get it to read the rest of the code from the paper tape reader).
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I didn't say it was better overall, but being able to fix a CPU problem using nothing more than a voltmeter, soldering iron, and a few transistors definitely appeals to the geek in me. It was long out of DEC support, but it didn't matter since we had the full service manuals with schematics. That was probably the last time in my life when I actually cared about transistor bias voltages.
Swapping out a motherboard just isn't the same - my mother could do that since all of the connectors are keyed differently
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I like the days of yore better. Computers were simpler then. The software, the hardware, the protocols, all of it.
Back then it was possible to understand everything that was going on in your system, and there is something very beautiful about that. You could know how every command worked and how it did it, down the the binary data it was sending down the serial port if you wanted. Now, even though I know what seems like an encyclopedic amount of information about computers, there are large gaps in my knowledge where I either know nothing or I have only a general idea of whats going on.
Then again I can now play Angry Birds on Chrome so that kinda sooths the nostalgia.
Excuse me, just passing through, didn't mean to step on your lawn.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Simpler (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm more annoyed because I can't hook up the registers to blinkenlights [starringthecomputer.com] or input data a bit at a time with switches. 512 words [ed-thelen.org] is more than enough memory (a bit less than 1k bytes). 0x31 == 1 ?? What a waste of bits these modern systems are!
starwars (Score:2)
Session closed ... (Score:2)
I got "session closed", what did you get? ;-p
Man, the Internet of 25 years ago ... I think I got my first modem ever in early '89 ... So that's 22 years at best ...
Wow ... vt52, pascal, bangpath, TeX, alt.binaries, uudecode, multitasking, c, Linux, code monkey ... Ahhh, the memories of youth. :)
Wow, the Internet that came before me ... What a mystical place ... I can't express the glee when I discovered FTP and free stuff.
Now my mom has a e-reader she's trying to hook up to her wifi. Does anybody else find
Telnet alternative (Score:3)
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Mod parent +1 informative! (Score:2)
telnetting in works!
What's it supposed to be? (Score:3)
I'm not sure what 80s system it's supposed to be emulating. It's not a BBS. It's not TOPS-20. It's not VMS. It's not SAIL. It's not ITS. It's not an ARPANET TAC. It's not Multics. It's not UNET on UNIX.
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I'm not sure what 80s system it's supposed to be emulating. .
Seems kinda TOPS/10 to me.
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Not Quite (Score:3)
I had an amber monitor . . .
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Haha, yeah, our computer classrooms were all equipped with amber VT terminals. Some were actually white, but not one, as far as I can remember, was green phosphorus.
And we had... hundreds of these terminals, all connected to some powerful (for the time) Sun server. I never had as much fun on the internet, as back then. It was all mesmerizing. And people were genuinely excited and glad to connect across the world. Now we are all so fucking jaded.
prescient futurama jokes are awesome. (Score:2)
He who loves a one-eyed-girl thinks that one eyed girls
are beautiful.
You had to be there (Score:3)
I think you had to be there, before the time of Google and instant information, to truely appreciate the challenges and wonderful triumphs that were possible. And of course, being in a community with ONLY the top 1 or 2 million in intelligence was nice also. It was a magical time and now it's just noise. Sure there's some smart kids and I really like the whole "being nice is cool" thing, ala reddit, and etc. but I've seen it a million times: once everyone is doing it, it's not cool anymore. But I think this is a time when the roots of tech, the old timers, really need to step up and make sure this thing lasts in the true spirit of what we intended it to be. It truely is a new form of freedom, but it could easily be the makings of a new form of slavery as well. We need to remember that the net is about communitity, not a group of people or a city but this idea that everyone has something to contribute and that the easier it is to contribute, and the more that is contributed, be it good, bad, valuable or worthless, makes it more valuable. The fact that we are greater than the sum of our parts, really just bits of electricity in the world's largest circuit. Let's make sure that free flow is ALWAYS here.
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You know what was fun? Finger was mentioned, and it was still up in use until about oh 2004 or maybe 2006 with a lot of game dev's who used it as part of the .plan system. And for a lot of people interested in the industry it was a seriously kick ass way to get dev. input and help on your own projects. I dunno I guess while everything has become grand, great, and pretty kick ass. There's a lack of personalization these days on the whole.
Damn it ... GET OFF MAH LAWN! *wave spike cane of doom menacingly*
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While the old timers may love it, you suddenly realize that back then, because Internet access was pretty much command line _everything_, you had to be fairly literate in command-line UNIX just to be able to use it. Small wonder why Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, which eventually turned Internet access into one with a real graphical user interface (I still remember accessing the 'Net with Mosaic in early 1994--it was a huge breakthrough in terms of accessing the Internet).
It looks like its the early 1990's, but it's not. (Score:2)
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Cf: http://sdf.lonestar.org (Score:2)
Last time I checked, the Subj site & a few related ones STILL offered
"command-prompt" (a,k,a. shell access) to the Internet, eg for students
& others (eg, some disabled or on dial-up lines) with need or interest
in accessing the 'Net in similar ways.
Still, it was nice to be reminded of earlier times... :-)
Mist, Dikumud and Cheeseplant's House next please (Score:2)
Text only, kermit transfers, cursing as once again you realised you forgot to put FTP into image mode before you downloaded that shareware from funet.fi...all of it.
Do wish there was still a way to play MIST [wikipedia.org] though, and the associated Cheeseplant's House [wikipedia.org]. We would hang out in Cheeseplant's House waiting for a slot on MIST. Interesting (well to me at least) that they describe it as the second talker - must admit I thou
Vuja De (Score:4, Funny)
My God, it's Craigslist with Night Mode on.
Copyright Infringement? (Score:2)
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This is the evidence we need! As internet dwellers we can claim it is ingrained in our culture to infringe on copyrights!
Sucks! (Score:2)
I do not like that Arpanet thingy. It doesn't run on my iPad ...
It was the "Internet" before 1985 (Score:2)
In 1985, I had already been calling it the "Internet" for some time.
Can i download a VM (Score:3)
Considering the minimal resources required to reproduce this, any chance this is running on a VM or something that we could 'take home' as our very own? ( for when this fades into the abyss of time and memory )
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I think the point is, but may be wrong, is that now it is ubiquitous, whereas before it was something a person wanted or was drawn to do. Computing today is kinda lame really, because it isn't exclusive at all. It gets old, invasive, and yes all over the place. But has it solved any of the worlds problems? *looks around*... we still have plenty. *goes back into cave*
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I think the point is, but may be wrong, is that now it is ubiquitous, whereas before it was something a person wanted or was drawn to do. Computing today is kinda lame really, because it isn't exclusive at all. It gets old, invasive, and yes all over the place. But has it solved any of the worlds problems? *looks around*... we still have plenty. *goes back into cave*
Well all I know is that growing up I couldn't talk to people from around the world for free, and if I wanted information I was limited to my local library if and when I could get there. If I was sick I relied on the rubbish doctors in my neighborhood to diagnose and treat me. If I wanted to do real science I had to make it my career, where now I can run all manner of science and math apps. If I wanted music I had to go and physically purchase it. If I wanted to compare prices it would take hours. Nothing wa
Couldn't get on the net back then anyway (Score:2)
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The only thing the computer has done, the way we use it, is to make it quicker to come to the wrong conclusions.
Some people use the computer to make it easier to back up and try a new path having once come to the wrong end-point. That's a real improvement.
But it also makes it easier to just blindly try more wrong paths. Computers induce a lot of churn into our daily lives. I guess that's different. I'm still not convinced it's substantive. Too many of the important problems have too many paths to try, so ma
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It has been. The Nokia N900 is basically that - although Nokia have now abandonded it to the wind it's still an immensely usable device.
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Wish the N900 had been available in Japan.
I guess there are Androids that are close, but I sure don't like the on-screen keyboard.
I think I need to check Android out a bit better.
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Accessing telehack with it right now B-)
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I would give you mod points if I could. There are definitely some scary aspects to the current state of the world's technology, but there are also miraculous things. It is SO much easier for someone with a brain and a basic understanding of maths and science to do their own backyard R&D. The answers are literally at your fingertips. If you can think it, someone has proba
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Well, back in the early 80's, you could talk to people around the world for free. Fidonet was your friend.
I was in primary school in Australia. I didn't know a thing about Fidonet, and if I did I couldn't afford it anyway.
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It was free for access, at least on my BBS. Granted it wasn't in Australia, and you had to have your own computer and modem. But you need your own computer now to be on the net so no difference. If I could correspond with someone in Russia I do believe Australia would have been accessible to me as well. And the rest of the world to you. However, I do recognize that you may not have been of an age where you had money to do that. And I may be a bit older than you, therefore having more say or money at t
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In the 80s my parents were making overseas calls via operator. Certainly international video conferencing wasn't accessible.
I hope you're wrong about things regressing to the Fidonet days. That would be a real shame. Microsoft buying Skype is a worry actually.
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I'm 90% certain I still can. Unless all of /. is actually sitting outside my window, and I'm actually shouting this instead of typing it.
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Yes, the internet failed to solve all the problems of the world, therefore it's worthless.
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So what's next? We got to go out and keep going. We have nothing to lose because we don't have anything.
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Agreed. I was excited to find a BBS a few months ago that was still running the same software I used when I was a SysOp myself in the late 80's. After about 15 minutes online the nostalgia effect quickly gave way to the reality that, well...it just sucked. +++ATH0
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Oh God, AT modem commands. I haven't given those any thought in probably over a decade. Wow, I remember having a particular command string that I liked for some particular reason (I think it gave me an extra 1200bps at the loss of some stability). Thanks for the nostalgia.
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I remember that telemate was the best (protocol selection, external protocols, text/notepad windows, dos window, etc....but I used MTE 'cuz it gave me fake MNP-5, the data compression/error correction(MTE = MNP Terminal emulator)...at 1200 and 2400bps it made a difference....I forget which v.32/42 or "bis" protocol that is....my gut tells me v.32.
I had two favorite initialization stings....one for my telecom progr
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X0 was the shortest text output from the modem; I usually went for the opposite extreme with X4, so it would log everything while it was connecting.
I remember that for a while my lines were in horrible shape, so I would use s7=255 to disable the dropout detection, and ride out the line noise.
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You may find a BBS, but you won't find the people you talked to. /., before the designers ruin it with video and ajax, driving the old school nerds away.
It's not the technology that has changed the most, but the users.
If you want nostalgia and nerd talk, go to
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"If you want nostalgia and nerd talk, go to /. ..." ...and wait 45 seconds even on 8 core machines before your one line answer finally gets posted, just like in the olden days.
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You may find a BBS, but you won't find the people you talked to.
Not necessarily true. One of the boards I called 15 years ago still has telnet access and many of the old 'callers.'
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What is this trying to emulate? A telnet BBS that had a few unix-like commands? I would at least hope for a shell account on some big old university iron running usenet and talk with the clocks set back to 1983 as the real experience. Remember that this era was pre-PC, with no access outside the uni or a connected company.
BBS's, that's nostalgia. Making a phone call to a computer system in someone's basement that if you were lucky had more than one phone line or modem so you could interact with random user
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Just watched the linked video to the end, it's awesome to see SMS and Internet chat shorthand like "brb", "LOL", and smileys being used in chat rooms 22 years ago. Take that you whippersnappers! ;)
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Computing was super cool back in the day, but it's so much cooler now
You don't use facebook or youtube much do you? The internet back then was more information and less opinion. There's a lot more information out there now which is great, but _everybody_ wants to share their opinion with _everyone_, and nobodies opinion except mine is worth listening to! ;p
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Hey, the constitution protects freedom of speech! Nobody said anything 'bout a right to be heard.
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Nostalgia is about mortality. Those of us who remember those times also are aware that we were 20 years younger then. Technology may develop indefinitely, but we will pass on. Those technologies of the past bring us back, ultimately, to a time 20 years farther away from our own deaths.
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All I see is "Session closed."
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Nevermind, reloading the page a few times fixed it.
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That, or how you normally make it worse.
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That, or how you normally make it worse.
This.
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telnet, FTP, and Archie, then it isn't the real thing.
I was fortunate enough to have a father who worked at BBN at this time, and so I was immersed in network technology as a teenager. I remember him excitedly showing me a copy of NCSA Mosaic (an early web browser) and I was like Text documents? What's the point?" Funny.
The summary says Telehack is supposed to be from the 1980's... Gopher, Archie, and Mosaic didn't come out until the early 1990's.
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This is why people like Jason Scott are my heroes.
They're preserving our history, the history that the rest of the world doesn't care about and would happily forget.
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You're not sorry. You'll do it again the next opportunity.
It really pisses me off when people say they are sorry, while they actually aren't. It ruins the meaning of the word and makes people who are truly sorry left without words.
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So THAT's it, and I thought it's a beard.
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367 users? OMFG, everyone on the arpanet is on my server!
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You mean the days when people could do links properly?
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