Worlds First Website Just Turned 25 Years Old - And It's Still Live

originally posted by: abe froman
a reply to: reldra

No joke, cassette tapes were like disk drives back in the day.

I remember really, really BIG floppy discs. Maybe a lil before my time, a casette tape connected to a computer.

a reply to: reldra



I looked and saw many, did not know. lol
Some pics had separate players plugged in somehow.

Speaking about BBS's. Remote Access with Front Door. Fidonet, Echonet, and more.. My old bbs is on a historical bbs list. Thank you for jogging my memory ghostrager. I miss that packardhell computer with that amazing 14.4 modem.

a reply to: Xtrozero
Wildcat BBS was the engine for the "site".

a reply to: ghostrager

From the page source code:
Copyright CERN 1990-1992The information (of all forms) in these directories is the intellectual
property of the European Particle Physics Laboratory (known as CERN).
It is freely availble for non-commercial use in collaborating non-military
academic institutes. Commercial organisations wishing to use this
code should apply to CERN for conditions. Any modifications, improvements
or extensions made to this code, or ports to other systems, must be
made available under the same terms.

Source

I worked in IT back then at AOL and we had a version of AOL that was called PCAO 2.0 and was a MS-DOS version of AOL and a we had the first Windows version Windows v3.0!

I wrote a lot of the trouble shooting and modem strings AOL used in their troubleshooting for tech support back then as you could hardly stay connected with the whopping 300 Baud and super fast 1200 Baud modems back then without custom strings almost 23 characters or more long lol!

This brought back memories. Not many people today have been trough being a tech on all the MS Operating System iterations from DOS to Windows from the start like me that I run into. I know some and we are all old men now lol!

Thanks for the memory jolt GhostRager!

Bitnet, Gopher and WAIS on PDP'11's were my precursors to WWW, and even that started out as text based, using the ubiquitous AltaVista search engine. We used to run Adventure and Zork through TTY's! Compuserve ruled in those days. Netscape was the real enabler for all PC's but my first graphic capable was an Apple 2E and then into Mac's using AOL before I purchased a Leading Edge 286.

It has been an incredible ride.

That was a great post OP, and just look what has been accomplished in 25 years. Imagine what the next 25 will be like!

a reply to: reldra

Haha, yea I had a TRS-80 with a casset player to load programs and it had a whopping 4K of memory! It was the cutting edge new personal computer. I played blackjack on it and to make any graphic was an ardous BASIC program to write.

It is truly amazing to see how far we came. From very simple file, to OS's now with over a Gig of data and millions of files in them.

originally posted by: Gothmog

originally posted by: Xtrozero

originally posted by: Gothmog
But , we had BBS servers that served the same purpose (yes even conspiracy sites) long before that . Since we had very narrow local call ranges , anyone here remember how we got around the tremendous long distance charges for downloading that 2k file ?
S&F for the memories..

Fido echo

Here is one for ya The Temple of The Screaming Electron out of San Fran...

You betcha. And a friend and I ran a conspiracy site Wildcat BBS setting on Apache server before 90 .

Thanks for that, i'd almost forgotten about the Mustang Wildcat net server software from the 90's i have it somewhere, now i want to go and see if i can find it.

originally posted by: reldra
Later, more than one D&D novel had the name reldra as a minor character. I posted that on a modern TSR website. I could have sued. I didn't.

Minor character you should feel honored, I had a friend who posted there also under the name Khelven, someone changed one letter and made a major character out of him then threw the original creator a bone by saying the famous Khelben was named for a plane hopping mage.

TI=99 4a modded to 32bit proc with 64 bit memory addressing bridge with brain box with the dual floppies one internal on on the fire hose, quad speech synth and a 150 baud indirect connect cradle modem connected to the Geezernet port RS485.

Oh man I miss that rig.

Many a nights up on compuserve reading the boards.

I had a "Trash-80" (TRS-80) back in the day, complete with the cassette storage media. I saw all the evolutions of DOS (pre-MS days).

I learned BASIC on a mainframe, because PC's were too new and too limited to handle anything this "complex".

I can remember when dial up modems were separate devices, and later when they were an 'option' on a PC.

I remember asking... what is this thing they call the "Internet"?

I remember looking in the back of magazines at BBS ads, and looking to see if any of them had local or toll free numbers.

I can remember the first time someone told me about a service called CompuServe, and how amazing it was. I signed up. I used CompuServe for many years. In later years people would comment about how low my 5 digit registration number was (one of the first 75,000 users to register).

Heck, I can remember the very first time I got a reply, the very first time another human being replied to me using electronic media. That very first time "You have (1) message" showed up when I logged into my account, in that moment a wave of amazement came over me. I knew the entire World had just changed. Things would be different now.

Until that moment I had thought the whole thing a sham, a gimmick. How foolish I had been. I'd sat there in front of my computer thinking, 'let's see, what is the most difficult and obscure question I can ask (for which I know the answer) to see if this whole "internet" thing was real'. Then, low and behold, a couple days later..."You have (1) message" I remember snickering to myself as I opened the message figuring it just to be some gimmicky advertisement or something. To my amazement it was a comprehensive reply, from a real person, who had found, read and actually thought about my query. I felt bad in a way, somehow guilty, for asking a question I already knew the answer to. Someone had taken the time to assemble a coherent response to a difficult question. And while my question had been polite, my motives had been somewhat cynical, skeptical even. I felt bad for wasting this person's time. But I'd seen it with my own eyes, and a wave of amazement and fear almost swept over me...The World would be different now. Humans were talking to other humans using computers, and this represented a fundamental paradigm shift.

Computers had been around for a couple decades by the time terms like "The Internet" and "World Wide Web" became part of our vocabulary. Heck, mankind had been to the Moon already (...although this is debatable here on ATS!), but prior to that moment digital interaction across electronic media remained for rarified crowd. Things would be different alright.

I remember MS Windows 3.0, and I remember how Windows 3.11 was supposed to be such a dramatic 'upgrade' to 3.0. Heh, I remember figuring out what 'File', 'Edit' and so forth did.

Oh the memories!

Thanks for the mental walk down memory lane.

Here's a trivia / memories question for you all...

Who remembers using WYSIWYG?

To me, the first time I saw WYSIWYG was the first time I realized PC's were here to stay.

And then there was the old Compaq 'Portable PC'.

I registered a domain name and had a web site and hosts on the internet in 1996.

It's been interesting to watch it be brought into the main stream and to see what approaches good and bad have token with it.

My first introduction to "computer studies", as it was back then, were acoustic couplers - an internet of sorts (oh and punched cards and tapes).

Using BASIC, we'd code in a game of naughts and crosses (this was on something that resembled a typewriter, no screen) and make a move. We would then use the acoustic coupler to send the details of the move to the mainframe - housed in building some two miles away.

A week later, the mainframe would reply.

It was a years later that I read a PC magazine espousing the wonder of the URL.

Am I giving away my age here?

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
Here's a trivia / memories question for you all...

Who remembers using WYSIWYG?

To me, the first time I saw WYSIWYG was the first time I realized PC's were here to stay.

I remember WYSIWYG being more like WYSINWYG.

wow I started working at Sears in 92 selling packardhells, cause I "knew" computers. ( that's a monitor,that's a keyboard, that's a mouse. You are hired!) I didn't even know what a C prompt was. Got a free compuserve account on being hired.

I learned enough to know they were putting 486 chips on 386 motherboards........ that only took me 90 days, I remember how proud I was in my "first" CD-ROM installation, AND it worked!!

yes and Modem strings, getting so good at modem setup I could Hear if a connection would be good or not. Or being told by tech support "you know more then I do"

then spending the next 10 years repairing the "magic" boxes.....

someday I should go to school for this stuff............

originally posted by: thedigirati


yes and Modem strings, getting so good at modem setup I could Hear if a connection would be good or not. .

This. When I had a dial-up connection to AOL.

Those were the days. My first month online cost me £330...

a reply to: reldra

Cassette storage was common back in the day. It was a peripheral for the Commodore as well.

I learned BASIC and Pascal on a TRS 80. We had maybe 20 of them in our junior high computer lab. And 5 Tandy's running MS DOS

a reply to: ghostrager

74 more years to play with legos