freeform goodness

I enjoyed Maciej Stachowiak’s post about finding really old Usenet posts by yourself (and others). The earliest post of mine I could find in the Google Groups archive dates back to 1990, though I know for certain that I was reading and posting on Usenet as far back as 1989. Even at that early date, my knack for providing partially yet essentially inaccurate information of dubious use is apparent.

It’s hard to stress how very different a place the internet was in 1990. There was almost no commercial traffic on the internet. As a matter of fact, one of the very first commerical enterprises, Brad Templeton’s Clarinet, didn’t start delivering newsfeeds (in many ways, the great great great grandparents of today’s RSS feeds) until well into 1989. Just about everyone with internet access had net access via a university or a governmental agency or their scientific contractors. The ISP, as conceived today, didn’t exist. The total number of people with regular internet access, globally, was probably in the tens (or low hundreds) of thousands. There was no spam. There were weenies, though. There will always be weenies.

Looking at the stuff with the benefit of hindsight is fun, though. I found a post where I mentioned some “cheap” hardware available at the time — a 13-inch color monitor and 1MB video card for the lowlow price of $800, in the context of a thread discussing whether the then brand-new JPEG compression format had a future.

:: Dave Walker 19:06 (EST/EDT) [+]

:: [/tech/computers/internet]
:: tags: internet

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