Tag Line (What it Means)
We all know Al Gore invented the Internet, right? What many don’t realize is that there was a time when “The Web” didn’t exist! That’s right, kiddies! Once upon a time, way before Netscapasaurus ruled the Internet (for those of you who are REAL young, read up on the browser wars) there was a thing called “Mosaic.” Put on your time-travel hats, kids, ’cause we’re going all the way back to 1994 on this one!
Basically, Mosaic was sort of like your modern browser but really slow, simple, and limited. Oh, there were others, like Lynx, a text-only web browser that somehow inexplicably is still around to this day (only for real dorks), but Mosaic was the “good” one.
Back then, you could, in theory, call in to your ISP, fire up Mosaic, and actually browse the rudimentary beginnings of the World Wide Web. I say “in theory” because I was never patient enough to hang around long enough to let a website fully download. I do recall having ordered flowers from an early version of 800-Flowers’ website once… I believe it took over an hour, or just about 400% of the time it would have taken me to drive to a florist. The idea that I managed it on the computer, however, without having to talk to a human on the phone or in person seemed to make it all worthwhile. Ironic considering that now I often long for the days when you’d call a business and actually talk to a human voice.
Back then, the real cool kids on the ‘Net were using Compuserve… There was also a little thing called AOL. These companies basically provided their own content rather than leading you to the “real Internet.” I remember once having an AOL account and seeing on the opening page “World Wide Web coming soon!” I used AOL for an ISP and minimized the program to go to the “real Internet.”
Back in those days, search engines were pretty much unheard of. “Googling” was not a verb. My method of finding things on the Internet? Gopher. Gopher and his friends Archie and Veronica (I don’t know what happened to Betty) would find stuff for me based on crude keyword searches, usually on university servers, and I would fetch my files with an FTP program. Most of the time, I had no idea what I was getting until the file had downloaded, which took a lot of time and patience. It was like fishing.
In those pre-Google days, I would buy a publication called “The Internet Phone Book,” which listed sites for various subjects. The book was about four inches thick and printed on newsprint. I think the cost was around forty bucks.
Although Gopher, Veronica, and FTP were very primitive, and checking the results was similar to picking a candy out of a box of See’s Chocolates (sometimes you got a great one, usually just OK, and sometimes it was a godawful chocolate-covered-cherry), I remember a bit later starting to feel nostalgic for that way of using the Internet as I fired up the second generation of Netscape to find what I needed via a search engine called Hotbot.
Usenet was another one of my favorite Internet pastimes… and oh boy would that time pass! Usenet still exists today, but Average Joe doesn’t know about it. It’s similar to “forums” or Google Groups, but in a more rudimentary fashion. To see the messages, you actually need something called a “newsreader” (if you have Outlook or Thunderbird, you have a newsreader… didn’t know that, did ya?). I would download the latest updates on my favorite groups and read them daily. Eventually, people started figuring out how to encode files and transfer them via Usenet. I remember decoding many a picture file and even early MP3 files around 1998. Yep… you needed WinAmp to play ‘em, but you could get pirated music online more than ten years ago!
Now, pretty much anything you want is just a Google search away. We’re spoiled. We carry the internet around on our phones and get impatient when the signal takes more than a few seconds to beam to us via satellite. We watch streaming movies in relative high-definition on Hulu… Well, what am I doing? You already know all the stuff you can do on the Internet.
To think that there are children alive now who will never know a world without the Internet… without Google… without HD streaming video… My baby niece likely knows more about computers right now than I did in my early twenties! …Someday in the future, when we all have computers embedded in our skulls and we download from iTunes by making ever-so-slight eye movements, I’m going to bore the crap out of my niece with this story.
Christopher
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I’m holding out for Google implanted in a molar with heads up led contact lens display and cochlear surround sound.
to this day, the best Coffee Cake recipe I’ve ever found was via GOPHER to University of Minnesota. If only I had an oven here in Korea.
I like this article. As avid lovers of coffee and for someone who consumes 10-12 cups, your post sticks. I like the style of writing too! Great job!!
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