A bit of web nostalgia

Ahhhh - the good old days. Life was simple back then - no transactional systems, I could count the websites in my company on one hand and still have a few fingers left over, Ma and Pa used to take us down to the corner store in our horseless carriage for some gumdrops and sarsaparilla...

Celebrating the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla Project, a couple of the sites from the old days have been brought back online. A more comprehensive guide with links to some classic antique browsers is available from JWZ. If you're looking for some excitement this Friday night, you can download a copy of Mosaic Alpha 7 to relive the thrill of your first animated image.

Browsing these pages brought back some memories and made me curious. What first turned YOU on to the web? Here's my story...

I was doing the third shift data center guy thing. Spinning tapes, running jobs, etc;. We had some spare time - especially come 3am. I recall this thing called 'Gopher'. How cool - I could actually look at information from other places (albeit text only) from this nifty little browser type thing.

Fast forward a bit.

The text based stuff was certainly cool, but it was Mosaic Alpha 7 that grabbed me. By this time, I'd moved on to a help desk gig during the day. We'd spend all of our time trying to help users solve problems via the phone.

Times have certainly changed. Back then, we struggled with some beefy business problems...

"Hi, that square little plastic thing that I put files on got stuck in the slot on my computer. How do I get it out?"

or

"Hi, my friend emailed me a neat picture of the cast from Friends. How do I make it my desktop image?"

Yes. These were trying and complex times. But we seem to have survived ok.

With the user friendly nature of Mosaic, I had a self proclaimed moment of genius. "Gee", I thought, "if we put answers to the more common questions we get via the phone on this 'Internet' thing... Maybe users can help themselves???".

Bang. That was it. A couple of days later - a crash course in HTML - and we had a Help Desk Intranet launched that reduced call volume by 30% within a few weeks. Folks, I was hooked. Fast forward 14 years or so - here we are. Reflecting back on the major advancements of the web in over a decade is really quite fascinating.

We all tend to remember big things that influence our lives. I remember this little chapter like it was yesterday. Rehashing all of this made me curious - What's your story? Is there any one thing that really gave you the passion for the online world?

Comments

[Adam Cohen]

Ah those were the days. I was one of the first of my friends to buy a computer with a modem, and was laughed at (for probably many other reasons too). I used to be a TA for a computer science class in college called CS001. I actually had students in class who, in response to "just point and click," picked up the mouse like a TV remote control and pointed it at the screen. Part of that class was teaching basics of word processing and spreadsheets, but another part was teaching about browsing Mozilla and doing little scavenger hunts online. Light bulb went off for me when I could search for friends' email addresses at other schools.

I had an epiphany the next semester while doing a marketing internship at Sugarbush (ski resort in Vermont), and I pulled together the best proposal I have ever done on why Sugarbush should have a website and build a presence on AOL 2.0. Les Otten (former owner of the resort) rejected the proposal at the time as a waste of resources. I was a legend in my own mind.

[Rick McEachern]

I remember exactly when the novelty of the online world transitioned to the awe of possibility.

I always dabbled in online activity and thought it was fun and interesting. When AOL announced they were now enabling access to "The World Wide Web" with no extra charge, I signed right up. When USAir (that's what they were called then) allowed you to book tickets using your p.c, I immediately ordered the CD-ROM so that I could install the cumbersome apllication that worked with my 9600 modem. And of course, p.c. banking was available through Bank Boston with trip to the local branch where I filled out some forms and got hefy app for my 8lb laptop. It was called Homelink.

Then one day, i was driving down Rte 1 and saw a Billboard "Homelink - Now Available on the Internet" On the internet? You mean MY banking.. anywhere? from any machine? From my office OR my dad's house OR a cafe in London?

BRILLIANT!!

The power of the internet and online applications suddenly struck me, it was an immediate paradigm shift. I was sold, hooked and this became me new calling.

[gina]

My interest has always been in the social opportunities provided by the Web. I come from a very humble background, the term poverty-stricken doesn't miss the mark by much actually. I got online because I started college in 95 as a single mom. I was young, and I was the only one I knew in college, staying in and taking care of my little family PLUS doing homework.

Getting online opened a whole new world for me, very literally. I could connect with people all over the world going through similar problems. I could do some research, email the person who created my reference materials, and discuss the concepts and ideas with them. It was very empowering.

I was able to start looking for a diagnosis for my daughter (it turned out to be Asperger's Syndrome) using message boards, one of the early forms of social networking sites. Before her diagnosis, I got ideas on how to make her experiences at school and home more bearable. That would not have happened if I had never been exposed to different ways of thinking and seeing the world.

Because I come from a different class than I am living in now, the issues of the digital divide and using the Internet to empower disenfranchised people have always been extremely important to me. What interests me is how the Internet (for now) opens up communications. It's hard to hide agendas and the truth from people who know how to evaluate sources. Knowledge is power, and the Internet has the ability to empower everyone to know the truth.

[Peter Quirk]

Ok - I'll expose my age here, but my first remote online experiences were in the early 70's using a Texas Instruments Silent 700 portable terminal to login to work from home and other places. It must have weighed 70 lbs. (see http://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/ti-tymshare-100/index.html for pictures).

The next phase was accessing ARAPNET from Austalia via DG's X.25 Xodiac network. It connect me to a server in Westborough which was connected to ARPANET. I think that's when I started getting interesting programs from Simtel20. Everything was done with telnet and FTP in those days.

The next milestone (which Len will remember) was porting Gopher, Gopherd, WAIS and some other pre-web tools to my DG/UX workstation.

Then came the web, with the Lynx (text-only) hypertext browser and its httpd server.

Only after that did I port Mosaic to DG/UX and begin the fun and games with the real web. Does anyone remember the internet coke machine?