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Stardate: 20220125.1758
Location: xiled rumination concentrator
Input Device: xrc console
Audio: Alien Sex Fiend - Now I'm Feeling Zombified
Visual: xrc interor avec blinken lights
Emotional State: Hungry.
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Continuing from previous phost...[1]
UPDATE: found old CFN login screen from a friend's site:[2]
Trying 127.254.92.45...
Connected to freenet-in-b.cwru.edu.
Escape character is '^]'.
BSDI BSD/386 1.0 (kanga) (ttys8)
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WELCOME TO THE... _| |_
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| CLEVELAND FREE-NET |
| COMMUNITY COMPUTER SYSTEM |
|____________________________________|
brought to you by
Case Western Reserve University
Community Telecomputing Laboratory
Are you:
1. A registered user
2. A visitor
Please enter 1 or 2: _
Around 1993, I saved up my dimes and upgraded to an NEC Ready
Pentium 75mhz machine, which ran Windows 3.1. I think CompuServ,
AOL, and Prodigy were popular portals to the Internet, kinda like
Cleveland Freenet, but they were not terminal based and had their
own brand of GUI bloatware. Pieces of the Internet were accessible,
but most of the activity was around their paid, walled garden
subscription community/platform. I think I had a trial Prodigy
account for a bit, but let it expire. There was even Quantum
Link before that, but that was also kind of like a paid BBS thing.
Also around that time, I attended a local university, which had dumb
terminals that provided you with access to their text-driven system
for emails, internal and external academic resources and libraries.
It also had access to gopher, veronica, jughead, and WAIS (Wide Area
Information Server.)
I eventually got a student job in their IT department babysitting
the Slowlaris lab (lol!), minor computer fixes for the staff, and
making copies of floppies for the university's dialup Internet.
These floppies spanned 3x 3.5" floppies and included old favorites,
like Eudora for email, Netscape Navigator, WS-FTP, Trumpet Winsock,
terminal applications, and even GUI clients for finger,
gopher(wsgopher), and WAIS.
Since I was in the IT department, I was able to use the dialup
Internet at home, with Windows 3.1 and the internal 14.4K modem.
Back then, gopher and WAIS didn't have much appeal for me,
especially since it was used mostly for academic stuff. Nobody
that I was aware of had personal gopherholes and the personal home
pages were on the web. I was still drawn to the BBS communities,
but the new SLIP/PPP accounts and the Internet that it connected to
had my curiosity as well.
One thing that I liked about the Slowlaris lab was that I could
telnet to the Cleveland Freenet during slow times or when I wasn't
studying. Even though Slowlaris had Netscape in CDE, it ran slow,
even if the www back then was low bandwidth compared to now.
Stuff in the terminal was much quicker and I could also chat with
people in realtime as well. These skills I picked up in the terminal
became really handy, especially when the Internet started to go
mobile much later.
After I left the university, I ended up learning HTML v3.x, spent
time making banner ads for a web design firm for a bit, and got a
job working at a regional ISP from someone on irc (EFnet, w00t!)
I also bought my first domain and co-located my server at the ISP
on a Cyrix 6x86 running slackware. Our workstations at the ISP
were Sun Microsystems Sparcstations and most of our tools and work
were done in the terminal. I helped prep and was on call for the
non-event of the Y2K bug. By this time, HTML 4.x was the standard,
macromedia had nice web tools, juarez ftp sites were still available,
and P2P File sharing started showing up. Several messaging
networks were available (ICQ, AIM, Y!, MSN, etc.) Video conferencing
was still very new, but we had CU-SeeMe reflectors (servers) popping
up for video chat rooms. Unfortunately, gopher was becoming a distant
memory.
Even though gopher is not popular today, it is still around and still
relevant. If it just remained as it was when I first saw it, which
was mostly academic, I probably would not be interested. But the
important thing is that the community has taken that protocol of old
and repurposed it into what it is now. We didn't have personal gopher
holes or gopher logs back then. It is nice to have the option of
low bandwidth Internet with protocols like gopher, or even the newer
gemini, and also the various pubnix communities, like SDF, tildeverse,
circumlunarspace, etc. It is also nice to be a part of and watch it
grow with the old, tailor-made, and new, federated technologies.
I think that when the information superhighway took off, one of the
biggest things that I missed that I didn't realize was the sense of
community and belonging that I found on local BBS's. The WWW did
try to replicate some of this with email lists, web rings, and
forums, but these were not sustainable and most eventually went away.
Also, with everything going so global, much of what I experienced
seemed so transitory, impersonal, ambiguous, inauthentic.
I think that is why the SDF community really appeals to me now.
Such a great community which reminds me of the netizens from before
and shelters me from the Internet of now. Much gratitude to the
admins and the community for keeping SDF operational and helping me
to remember as well as learn new things!
Thanks to SDF user, szczezuja, for the topic and giving me an
opportunity to dive into the wetware of long-term storage. I am
very forgetful these days and any chance I have to rekindle the
neural pathways of old, I will try to take it!
[1] gopher://sdf.org/1/users/xiled/phlog/2022/20220124_intarnets
[2] http://cfn.tangledhelix.com
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