A show I never missed an episode of back in the day, The Computer Chronicles (which was on PBS back in the 80s and 90s, with Stewart Cheifet, and for a while it had Gary Kildall of Digital Research as hosts. This is a fascinating look at the very early stages of the public internet. Its funny to see a demonstration of getting on internet (as Stewart Cheifet calls it, not THE internet yet), using gopher and ftp to access resources, rather than a web browser (they mention NCSA Mosaic, but it hadnt taken off yet). When I started on the internet way back in those early days, it was also by using gopher and ftp, it was all command line, but I knew when I saw mosaic and saw HTML in action, it was obvious that would become the easy interface of the future on the internet for accessing resources, and it didnt take long until it did and eclipsed gopher. By this time there had long been BBS services which is how I and other geeks connected to the world and resources (with a dial up modem), and there was also the big commercial ones like CompuServe. (side note: I ran a commercial one myself for a while back in the late 80s/early 90s called Software Online, I had 3 phone lines and ran TBBS.) But there was also already big commercial services like Prodigy, which had a really nice (though sloooowwww) graphical interface, so Mosaic was really the answer to that, but in the public forum of the internet. The problem with BBS services was they were so limited, you had to dial up and access one at a time directly, and they often charged per minute fees, and censored what was on them etc. The internet was the promise of opening the world and freeing us of that tyranny, along with tying so much more together than those limited services. The problem back then was actually having a way to get on the internet, slowly the big services started putting gateways in (if you couldnt get on at work or the university). Anyway, with a year, Mosaic and then Netscape would change the internet experience to a graphical one, and the explosion and revolution began. Check out the video. Chris Swearingin, Editor, ComputerMagazine * Computer Magazine #Swearingin, #ComputerMagazine Chris Swearingin
Posted on: Sun, 04 Jan 2015 05:53:45 +0000