What was the internet like in 1989, heres a reproduction you can navigate!

[tggzzz]

LMAO some crazy shit in here.

Yes, quite amusing.

If you understand signal integrity, you might also find this worth a chuckle: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/raspberry-pi-pico/msg3482322/#msg3482322
But to see the full context you'll have to chassis back a couple of messages, because that poster doesn't include enough context.

[Syntax Error]

Forget not Le Médium Interactif par Numérisation d'Information Téléphonique - Minitel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

( It was an effective WWW long before HTML )

[JohnnyMalaria]

Forget not Le Médium Interactif par Numérisation d'Information Téléphonique - Minitel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

( It was an effective WWW long before HTML )

Given your country flag, I surprised you didn't use Prestel

[Syntax Error]

Forget not Le Médium Interactif par Numérisation d'Information Téléphonique - Minitel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

( It was an effective WWW long before HTML )

Given your country flag, I surprised you didn't use Prestel

Prestel was for lazy rich people to do their grocery shopping online. Which was odd because no-one knew what that meant or, why they never needed to go to the shops. Anyway they had housekeepers to do their grocery shopping.

One summer school, we used a Commodore Pet, a 300 baud modem and an accoustic coupler, to connect to a GEC computer in the building next door. And that was really-really cool plus, it sounded just like the telex radio signals. We all knew we were standing at the dawn of the new Information Age.

[bd139]

LMAO some crazy shit in here.

Yes, quite amusing.

If you understand signal integrity, you might also find this worth a chuckle: https://www.eevblog.com/forum/microcontrollers/raspberry-pi-pico/msg3482322/#msg3482322
But to see the full context you'll have to chassis back a couple of messages, because that poster doesn't include enough context.

That was a good read. GPT-3? 

[madires]

FTP and UUCP (and HTTP) are protocols that run on top of TCP/IP, which is the key part of the internet. If you were using any of those then you were using the internet.

Not quite, originally UUCP used a serial connection, i.e. via modem.

[CJay]

Forget not Le Médium Interactif par Numérisation d'Information Téléphonique - Minitel

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

( It was an effective WWW long before HTML )

Given your country flag, I surprised you didn't use Prestel

Prestel was for lazy rich people to do their grocery shopping online. Which was odd because no-one knew what that meant or, why they never needed to go to the shops. Anyway they had housekeepers to do their grocery shopping.

One summer school, we used a Commodore Pet, a 300 baud modem and an accoustic coupler, to connect to a GEC computer in the building next door. And that was really-really cool plus, it sounded just like the telex radio signals. We all knew we were standing at the dawn of the new Information Age.

Prestel was an essential if you were a Philips dealer/warranty agent, there were a *lot* of other businesses on Prestel, electronics, car dealers, all sorts of gateways and services that weren't necessarily publicly visible.

It was massively popular with travel agents too, Thomas Cook springs to mind and I think their IT people just pulled the system in house when Prestel disappeared because they still had a remarkably Prestel like booking system about 5 years ago when I was last involved with them.

[madires]

Forget not Le Médium Interactif par Numérisation d'Information Téléphonique - Minitel

Also BTX (Austria and Germany), Teletex (Switzerland), Teledata (Denmark), Videotel (Italy), Viditel (Netherlands) and Ibertex (Spain). All based on the British Prestel.

[coppice]

FTP and UUCP (and HTTP) are protocols that run on top of TCP/IP, which is the key part of the internet. If you were using any of those then you were using the internet.

Not quite, originally UUCP used a serial connection, i.e. via modem.

Yep. Unix to Unix Copy. A standard Unix utility to move files across dialup connections. Nothing real time or interactive like a TCP/IP connection. It simply got files where they needed to be, and did so very well for its time.

[bd139]

I know a company who was using it for EDI transfers in 2018 still....

[Syntax Error]

Prestel was an essential if you were a Philips dealer/warranty agent, there were a *lot* of other businesses on Prestel, electronics, car dealers, all sorts of gateways and services that weren't necessarily publicly visible.

It was massively popular with travel agents too, Thomas Cook springs to mind and I think their IT people just pulled the system in house when Prestel disappeared because they still had a remarkably Prestel like booking system about 5 years ago when I was last involved with them.

The blocky Teletext style graphics of Prestel defined the era of cathode ray TV. The advent of home PCs in the 1990's connected to Bulletin Boards, Newsgroups and other Compuserve/AoL messenger services, sent these expensive corporate facing services to the scrapheap. But I'm sure somewhere there's a Raspberry Pi running the Prestel stack.

Meanwhile last century, my first book on "the internet" had just ONE page dedicated to the World Wide Web; which dismissed the WWW as a niche for document retrieval. In depth, the book covered newsgroups, ftp, e-mail and search protocols called Gopher and Finger. Anyone remember fingering in the 90's? I hope not.

[rfclown]

... I used to use webcrawler and altavista, ...

I remember when altavista came out. It was like WOW. It was so much faster and produced so many more results that the other search sites of the time. Then Google completely changed the game by not only being really fast but somehow figuring out how to (usually) put what you were looking for near the top of the list.

[JohnnyMalaria]

... I used to use webcrawler and altavista, ...

I remember when altavista came out. It was like WOW. It was so much faster and produced so many more results that the other search sites of the time. Then Google completely changed the game by not only being really fast but somehow figuring out how to (usually) put what you were looking for near the top of the list.

Altavista was my go-to until it faded away and Google came along. But then came Bing which is my go-to now. I seem to find what I'm looking for quicker and the visual search feature is excellent - much better than Google's. One reason is that you can paste an image from the clipboard. Google requires a URL or you upload an image.

[JohnnyMalaria]

The blocky Teletext style graphics of Prestel defined the era of cathode ray TV.

I used to spend ages going through CEEFAX (Oracle was shit). However, if you tried to view CEEFAX pages from a video recording, it didn't always work out so well. Seeing CEEFUX written on the TV was amusing to my teen friends and me.

[Tom45]

I remember when altavista came out.

That reminds me of a funny story from the early days of Alta Vista.

I heard a news item about Kate Moss on the radio but I'd never heard of her. So since Alta Vista had just come out I thought that would be a good way to find out who she was. One of my first uses of Alta Vista.

Well there were a huge number of hits where I learned all about her.

There were even nude photos of her. That made me stop and think. I'd better be careful of who I might search for. A search for someone such as Rosie O'Donnell, or Rush Limbaugh could be a bad move.

[MIS42N]

I think the making of the Internet (and ARPAnet before it) was the development of TCP/IP as a routable protocol. There were plenty of other protocols around, Novell Netware, DECnet, whatever MS-DOS used, IBM SNA etc. But in many cases to get from one network to another was messy, using gateways. I think the other protocols were developed with local area networks in mind, and thought a wide area network would be a tack on, using point to point protocols such as X.25. TCP/IP was routable from day one.

Before what we now call the internet (being the world wide network) came into being, networks were described as intranet (basically what we now call a LAN) and internet just meant two or more intranets connected together, usually by gateways. Then people distinguished between THE Internet and a private internet by capitalising it. Nowadays these usages are obsolescent (although I notice I unconsciously used it above). Probably because there are few truly private networks, they all have paths to the world's internet.

I agree with people who say the title is misleading. 1989 saw the birth of the www, the internet was relatively mature and available at many universities in Australia well before.

My first home use of the internet was sometime in the 90s using dial up. I was connected and awaiting a 56Kb modem but had a 1200 baud modem so made the first connection with that. I think it took around a minute to download some pages, but it was magic.

[helius]

The Internet is literally a "network of networks", bridging between (locally) autonomous networks operated by different local authorities. That was the big idea in the late 1960s when it was first designed (as the ARPAnet), and the reason it continued to grow from then until now. The ARPAnet didn't use TCP/IP, since it didn't exist at the time. It used an older protocol called NCP (Network Control Protocol) based on a single type of packet router called an IMP. The IMP was a ruggedised Honeywell DDP516, that was connected to local computers at each site. Packets were addressed to each port on each IMP, which meant they were addressed to the computer attached to that port. The day when NCP was to be turned off and TCP/IP turned on across the entire ARPAnet was January 1, 1983. With the dependence on IMPs severed, the IP network router market began to grow with companies like Proteon, 3Com, and most significantly Cisco starting at around the same time. The historic government-funded ARPAnet was rechristened the NSFnet, and many corporate networks joined with IP gateways. The DNS architecture replaced the need to keep HOSTS files at each site updated, and domain name authorities began assigning globally visible names, with the first .COM in 1985.

Like many Unix features, UUCP was a discount version of this communication scheme. It also had support for offline message queueing and forwarding, which made it perfect for organizations without the cash to connect directly to the ARPAnet/Internet. The "bang paths" were required because messages could be sent to sites without a permanent Internet connection, but that were reachable via dial-up UUCP connections. The ARPAnet/Internet itself did not rely on message forwarding through a chain of hosts, since that function was performed by the network routers. (Let's not get into IP Source Routing.)

Today that world seems very far away. I wonder how hard it would be to create an actual "historic arpanet"? You would first need several dozen mainframe computers of all different types, plus terminals and IMPs... Traffic could be channeled through a VPN tunnel.

[EasyGoing1]

"Internet" was introduced in 1974, not by Al Gore.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675

Im sorry, but what you just linked was a description of the TCP PROTOCOL ... NOT the Internet!

The analogy would be the same as comparing a car to the highways that get all the cars to where they want to go. TCP is a language that can use the Internet ... it can also use a local computer running a program talking to itself on 127.0.0.1. But TCP is NOT the Internet ... that's cute though ...

No, Al Gore convinced Congress and the president back in 1992 to invest serious capital to take the existing ARPANET, USENET, and the myraid of other not yet fully interconnected internetworks and got them all connected on a national and global backbone.  The title "THE INTERNET" did NOT exist before the US funded that bill and completed the work which brought all of those networks to the home user at a fair price.

Like I said, I WAS THERE, I HAD THE BILL IN MY HANDS AND I READ IT ... I remember what happened...

If you think I'm lying to you ... there's always Google ... PLEASE fact-check me IM BEGGING YOU!

:-)

[EasyGoing1]

Technically there was no Internet in 1989. We have the Internet today because Al Gore introduced legislation into Congress around 1992 I believe. The bill was called "The Information Super Highway Act" - I remember because when I heard my electronics instructor talking about it in class one day, I actually wrote Al Gores office asking about it, because it was always a fantasy of mine to interconnect computers at high speeds. They actually sent me a copy of the bill with a nice letter thanking me for being interested in it. The bill was HUGE ... hundreds of pages ... mostly legalese, but the summary at the beginning I remember some of ... the argument that Al Gore used to justify getting the money to create this new Information Super Highway was something along the lines of "As we did after world war II when we beefed up infrastructure such as building more highways, etc. so that we could more effectively move around the country, we need to once again invest in the "Information Super Highway" so that people can efficiently gain access to information that they now cannot access at all because there is no existing means from which to do so.

Now, I can't say, because I don't know, exactly HOW our government brought that into existence, or what that money was actually spent on because the Internet was simply an extension of ARPANET and other networks that only government buildings and higher education facilities had access to. And it seems that the gatekeepers of the newly formed Internet belonged to the telephone companies. So it seems to me that the bill, once it got funded, merely subsidized the cost of bringing all of those existing networks onto a backbone and that each major telco was given a tax-funded point of access to that network. And I'm sure ONE of the big telco companies retained ownership of that backbone or maybe it was divided up amongst them I'm not sure.

My first exposure to high-speed Internet was in the early / mid-'90s when I worked as a tech at Edwards AFB in California and some of their computers still had text-based web browsers - Mozilla I believe - And Netscape was the only graphical browser and it ran on Windows 3.11. But right around that time was when the Internet spread like wildfire! Suddenly if you had AOL, you could access the Internet, same with Compuserve ... then soon after that, the phone company was selling internet connections and there was a fast push to get modems working as fast as possible which brought about the 56k modern into the affordable price range ... then Europe brought ISDN which had wider adoption out there than it did here because we went to DSL pretty quickly ... then once cable modems came into their own and the telcos invested heavily into citywide fiber networks ... we now all have the blazing speeds that we have.

☺

Oh bless your heart, you really are clueless aren't you.

Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.

[coppice]

Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.

It seems you weren't paying much attention. Its not a coincidence that the availability of cheap 14.4kbps and 28.8kbps modems happened just as the internet really took off. Its WHY the internet took off. Governments did a couple of important things, like oversee the setup of a consistent global DNS heirarchy, and improve the IP number allocation scheme. However, it was time for things to explode, whatever governments did, because the PCs and comms equipment of the day had finally made it a feasible mass market system.

[EasyGoing1]

In my first post on this topic, I prefaced my statements about where the government funding was spent on in Al Gores bill. I said I didn't know exactly where the money went but I made an educated guess.  I was wong ... my guess was wrong ... so sue me...

Here are the actual facts surrounding Al Gores involvement with bringing the Internet into the public main stream. He was an active proponent of broadly deployed high speed network connections from as far back as the early 1970s in his political career and he was the first member of Congress who actually comprehended the potential in an Interconnected global set of networks being accessible to the general public.

This is a great summary of what he did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_technology

Now keep in mind I am no fan of Al Gore. In fact, I think he should be in prison for what he tried to do when he made that movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" ... but sadly as it seems to be true, politicians never have to answer for their crimes even when the evidence is irrefutable. But his involvement and active support of bringing the Internet to the public is a simple matter of fact and is well documented.

Mike

[EasyGoing1]

Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.

It seems you weren't paying much attention. Its not a coincidence that the availability of cheap 14.4kbps and 28.8kbps modems happened just as the internet really took off. Its WHY the internet took off. Governments did a couple of important things, like oversee the setup of a consistent global DNS heirarchy, and improve the IP number allocation scheme. However, it was time for things to explode, whatever governments did, because the PCs and comms equipment of the day had finally made it a feasible mass market system.

The government has never owned IANA ... and they MIGHT have been involved in its establishment, though I doubt it because it works perfectly. The government rarely does things with efficiency nor in a streamlined fashion and IANA works so well in fact, that we never even hear about them. They are the gatekeepers of every top-level domain and they dole out the IP addresses to ISPs and they have filled that role exceptionally well ever since their inception.

[coppice]

The government has never owned IANA ... and they MIGHT have been involved in its establishment, though I doubt it because it works perfectly. The government rarely does things with efficiency nor in a streamlined fashion and IANA works so well in fact, that we never even hear about them. They are the gatekeepers of every top-level domain and they dole out the IP addresses to ISPs and they have filled that role exceptionally well ever since their inception.

So, the government can't do anything good, but Al Gore, and the funding he obtained, was crucially important in kick starting the Internet? Do you see a little inconsistency in that argument?

[EasyGoing1]

Don't be a smart ass ... I was THERE ... I REMEMBER what happened ... how old are you anyways? And don't you know it's bad form to accuse someone of being wrong without actually demonstrating how they are wrong and being very specific about it? You must be a liberal cause they tend to think that just telling someone that they're wrong makes them wrong ... but life doesn't work that way because facts and evidence actually define reality. So go find your facts and evidence then come back and tell everyone how I'm wrong.

It seems you weren't paying much attention. Its not a coincidence that the availability of cheap 14.4kbps and 28.8kbps modems happened just as the internet really took off. Its WHY the internet took off. Governments did a couple of important things, like oversee the setup of a consistent global DNS heirarchy, and improve the IP number allocation scheme. However, it was time for things to explode, whatever governments did, because the PCs and comms equipment of the day had finally made it a feasible mass market system.

And wrong again, modems were already cheap LONG before the Internet took off in the public and long before we could ever purchase an Internet connection. Compuserve and AOL were already well-established services and they often gave modems away at computer shows and what have you just to get people to use their service.

What was NOT popular before the Internet boom happened was 56k modems ... and they didn't start showing up on the shelves of computer stores and other department stores until the Internet boom started ... booming. And it might actually be that one had no effect on the other where it's probably very likely that 56k modems would have exploded out into the retail market when they did regardless of the onset of the Internet.  All I know is that 56k modems had an engineering issue that needed to be solved before they could produce them for the public ... something about maxing out the capabilities of an analog phone line and some issues that introduced into the hardware that had to be solved, because we had 28.8 modems available for a few years before 56k finally came out. But even they were short lived once DSL hit the scene.

[EasyGoing1]

The government has never owned IANA ... and they MIGHT have been involved in its establishment, though I doubt it because it works perfectly. The government rarely does things with efficiency nor in a streamlined fashion and IANA works so well in fact, that we never even hear about them. They are the gatekeepers of every top-level domain and they dole out the IP addresses to ISPs and they have filled that role exceptionally well ever since their inception.

So, the government can't do anything good, but Al Gore, and the funding he obtained, was crucially important in kick starting the Internet? Do you see a little inconsistency in that argument?

Not at all ... government funded legislation usually gets awarded to private contractors anyway ... my point earlier was that I think it is highly unlikely that the government had anything to do with the design of the IANA organization because it works TOO WELL ... most likely it was created by savvy engineers and overseen by IEEE standards. BUT THAT IS MY GUESS ... I don't actually know how IANA got started and after posting this message, I'm going to find out.