Check out the Awesome Internets 1993 ie Cyberspace.

[Hugo Drax]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_o8gerare0

This brings back lots of memories. So anyone here remembers that era? Amazing how far we went from then.

 

[TheGardener]

Back then when you typed a topic or phrase into the Netscape or whatever browser's search engine you were using, you were very likely to be successful in finding exactly what article or webpage you were looking for in the first couple of links returned. Almost unheard of today. Sometimes I just give up after 20 or 30 choices, because the search engines don't understand what I'm looking for, or just want to return advertising.

 

[Paratus]

Back then when you typed a topic or phrase into the Netscape or whatever browser's search engine you were using, you were very likely to be successful in finding exactly what article or webpage you were looking for in the first couple of links returned. Almost unheard of today. Sometimes I just give up after 20 or 30 choices, because the search engines don't understand what I'm looking for, or just want to return advertising.

Um back in the day you couldn't type a phrase to search in your browsers search engine because there wasn't one.

And early search engine sites never had the hit rate that Google did and does.

Bro did you even try and hack the planet in the 90's?

 

[postmortemIA]

I remember gopher, telnet, and such... early days when Yahoo! directory was the king... sites were catalogued and you would not need to use search engine... then Altavista came out...

 

[Ns1]

I remember growing up my buddy had Prodigy and I was so jelly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)

 

[Sheik Yerbouti]

My 'go-to' back in the day.

 

[bommy261]

Where can I pickup this internet? Do they sell it at the Wal-Mart?

 

[SMOGZINN]

Man, the information superhighway is so cool! I totally dig being on this BBS with you Moes.

 

[rootaxs]

E-mail for me back then would be doing a nightly pack of all messages in my BBS, sending that off via dial-up for a couple of hours to a central server in the region. They in turn pack all local messages and upload it to the national server which makes an exchange further up the line for international exchange. Think FIDONet.

Responses were typically a 24-48hr time period, assuming folks respond quickly. Back then, that was quick!

These days, people at work freak out if i don't respond within a few minutes. Darn whippersnappers.

p.s. I ran that BBS on a massive 20mb "Plus+" drive that was roughly 18" long and plugged into an IDE slot. Ah, fun times. Wish i kept that piece of antique hardware, haven't seen anything like it since. On slow days, some folks would call me to swap out the disc of free/shareware that i had on my single cd drive. Eventually i just manually swapped them on a weekly basis to keep content "fresh".

 

[kn51]

I loved Fidonet. And newsgroups.

Simple markups and slow loading images. We've come so far to an era of intrusive auto playing videos and target ads that basically drag your computer to a crawl. And the loss of privacy.

Man I'm old.

 

[ElFenix]

I loved Fidonet. And newsgroups.

Simple markups and slow loading images. We've come so far to an era of intrusive auto playing videos and target ads that basically drag your computer to a crawl. And the loss of privacy.

Man I'm old.

scripting is ruining the internet.

 

[Perknose]

And early search engine sites never had the hit rate that Google did and does.

Not to mention the excruciatingly slow return time for any search. Anyone who wants to talk about the "good old days" of search engines before Google, well . . .

Back then when you typed a topic or phrase into the Netscape or whatever browser's search engine you were using, you were very likely to be successful in finding exactly what article or webpage you were looking for in the first couple of links returned. Almost unheard of today. Sometimes I just give up after 20 or 30 choices, because the search engines don't understand what I'm looking for, or just want to return advertising.

You aren't doing it right.

What stands out for me is, in the 80s and even a little bit into the early 90s, I could get through directly on the phone to high level engineering and tech dudes at just about any company who were happy to talk at length and in depth about any technical question I had.

p.s. I ran that BBS on a massive 20mb "Plus+" drive that was roughly 18" long and plugged into an IDE slot.

Let me guess. It was a 20mb Western Digital HD that had one of those sometimes hinky controllers that managed to get ~ 30 mb out of the same physical drive.

 

[Jeffg010]

I started on AOL dial up for about month until I got the phone bill for long distant charges. I then found a local dail up ISP and they sent me a trumpet winsock, NewsXpress reader and Mosaic browser and the rest was history.

Those 3 pieces software are what pushed world wide web to the masses.

NewsXpress
http://www.malch.com/nx1faq.html

trumpet winsock
http://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/

Mosaic Browser
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)

 

[Jeffg010]

Um back in the day you couldn't type a phrase to search in your browsers search engine because there wasn't one.

And early search engine sites never had the hit rate that Google did and does.

Bro did you even try and hack the planet in the 90's?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
The best search engine back then was AltaVista. It got sold to yahoo and turned into shit.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

The 2001 ultimate gaming PC episode was pure nostalgic bliss. Everything was so fresh back then. I completely forgot about the lizard demo. And I still have the Chieftec knock off of that Alienware case in service.

I do not remember the 90's as fondly as some. Dial up with *70,, floppies, manual IRQ juggling, almost everything was jumpers & dip switches. Buying mags to get the game demos. Though I do miss computer shopper being bigger than the phone book, and anticipating the new articles and ads.

 

[VirtualLarry]

And early search engine sites never had the hit rate that Google did and does.

Yeah... but AltaVista let you use logical operators to hone your search. I miss AltaVista. Back when you could fit the entire web's index onto a 64-bit server machine.

 

[EOM]

I fondly remember getting online for the first time... circa 1995/6 on AOL.... i feel like i was born 10 years too late to REALLY get into it and missed a lot of the pioneering era.

 

[TheSlamma]

6:40 see hipsters, you are unoriginal with your beards, decade after decade.

 

[Shlong]

I'm wearing a similar polo shirt to the host in the video... still in fashion.

 

[rootaxs]

Let me guess. It was a 20mb Western Digital HD that had one of those sometimes hinky controllers that managed to get ~ 30 mb out of the same physical drive.

It was called a "Plus+ Card", not sure if that's also the manufacturer, but i don't recall hearing about WD until many, many years later. Even then, the drives we were all so used to seeing were Conner (sp?) and Maxtor's.

I really wish i kept that old thing, if not for nostalgia purposes as i get older. It's almost as-if it never existed, i can't even find references to it on Google. It was a hand-me-down from our school professor -- that guy used to showcase a laptop that looked very similar to a Grid Compass - http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=900.

 

[sactoking]

Bring back browser panes!!!!

 

[master_shake_]

anyone else remember ftp.cdrom.com??

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9904/08/cdrom.idg/

Because FTP archives don't do a lot of thinking, wcarchive doesn't need a massive cluster of CPUs. In fact, it gets by with a single 200-MHz P6 Pentium Pro and a measly(!) 1 GB of RAM. The I/O support, however, is fairly impressive.
A six-channel Mylex RAID controller (DAC960SXI; Ultra-Wide SCSI-SCSI) is the centerpiece of the I/O subsystem. Two channels link it to the PC ("Personal Computer"!?!), via a dual-channel Adaptec card (AHA-3940AUW; PCI to Ultra-Wide SCSI). An 256-MB internal cache helps it to eliminate recurring disk accesses.
Four nine-drive disk arrays provide the actual storage. The two larger arrays use 18-GB IBM drives; the two smaller arrays use 9-GB Micropolis and Quantum drives. A separate 4-GB Quantum drive is used as the "system disk."
The output side is handled by a single Intel 100Base-T controller (Pro/100B PCI), which feeds into the Internet through a number of shared DS3 (45 Mbps) and OC3 (155 Mbps) circuits.

http://cmech.dynip.com/filebase.bbs/SIMTEL/docs/HTML/archive/wcarc.htm

 

[Perknose]

It was called a "Plus+ Card", not sure if that's also the manufacturer, but i don't recall hearing about WD until many, many years later. Even then, the drives we were all so used to seeing were Conner (sp?) and Maxtor's.

I really wish i kept that old thing, if not for nostalgia purposes as i get older. It's almost as-if it never existed, i can't even find references to it on Google. It was a hand-me-down from our school professor -- that guy used to showcase a laptop that looked very similar to a Grid Compass - http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=900.

Forgive me, I forget the details of a lot of this stuff. I think they were actually mostly 20mb Seagate (and maybe Maxtor) hard drives with WD controllers, but you could get a RLL (type, not brand) controller that would make the same physical HD a 30 mb . . . however sometimes with compatibility/reliability problems. I'm talking early/mid 80s, a couple of years after the IBM PC, when the "clones" were finally out in force, which we could afford! Remember the clone selling slogan, "Fully BIOS compatible?"

Right around the mid 80s Phoenix, and then AMI came up with bascially bullet proof BIOS chips that any clone manufacturer could buy, and that was that. I remember the hardest test being if a clone could run Flight Simulator.