Quote:
Originally Posted by drjd
I first saw the internet in 1995 when a friend brought a dial-up modem and connected my 386 with the telephone line. After umpteenth attempts we connected to web through Netscape Navigator. It was a horrible experience of wasting the time then, and my first reaction about internet was an utter dissatisfaction.  |
I had an "internet" account in 1984/'85. Of course it wasn't called that, it was ARPANET, and the particular flavor I had was MILNET. I would log onto the network at Kaneohe Bay or Camp Smith here on O`ahu with a 1200 baud (KBit/sec) dial up modem and connect to a 9600 baud underwater cable to San Diego. From there I could access any of a half a dozen or so university mainframes with telnet I suppose there were more, but I only had the IP addresses for a few.
In those days they didn't much bother with accounts and passwords. I guess they figured that if you knew enough to get to their login page you knew enough to be granted a guest account to their directories.
The whole rig wasn't very useful, the connection defaulted to 300 baud, and error checking and latency across the router hops dropped it even further so it was impractical to try to FTP anything over a couple of hundred kilobytes, and that was assuming that you knew what you were looking for and where it was. Error checking was by packet and file, so if the file checksums didn't match on a file that you spent all afternoon downloading, you had to start over and waste another half a day.
Then in 1989, Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, and nothing has been the same since.