the good old days before google were dark and involved horses

[seperis]

I am celebrating the fact that this time next week, this testing cycle is over and I will have glorious not terrifyingly days at work in which I will not be in a constant state of panic. Which also coincides with payday, so really, what can be better than that? A pony, that's what. Though not by much.So I was reading about how the internet now

Comments

[patk]

One word:

Usenet

[chrisjournal]

God, yes. Usenet and kermit and red ryder and bboards. Lynx and mosaic, before 'the web' got graphics. And what about 1993/the AOL invasion? There was fic out there, but it weren't easy to find, and Sturgeon's law was just as true then as it is now.

[ratcreature]

I remember looking for fandom stuff with gopher on ftp servers. Mostly comic info though, not fanfic.

[synecdochic]

September 1993! The September that Never Ended.

Did you know that AOL dropped its Usenet access a while back? Many oldtimers celebrated that October was finally here. *g*

[tekalynn]

Three words:

Green Card Lottery.

[almeda]

I can reliably spot age among people who all look 'about my age' by who can, without even thinking about it, spell anonymous correctly off the tops of their heads.

BTW, I'm a child of the very beginning of the Endless September: I got my first email account, through college, in fall 1993. And spent the next two years on MOO/MUCK/MUDs and Usenet. I very nearly had an alt.fan group at one point; the folks in alt.alt.alt thought I was funny enough that someone officially proposed 'alt.fan.podgirl' (which is what I was going by then) ... but the Usenet mod at my school refused to add it, so that never went anywhere.

[hradzka]

I miss Usenet. Well, no, I miss Usenet's *speed and usability.* Every time I open a web-based discussion board, I wish somebody would make a threaded newsreader for the web that would work as fast and as gracefully as trn. "Yes, I'd like to read that conversation, and that one, and that one, please, and this one is about something I don't like, so I'll skip it, and I hate that person so I've got my killfile set so that their posts and anybody's replies to them don't show up *at all,* and it takes me a few seconds to select everything I want to read and once I start reading I just press one button to instantly scroll through." I read really, really fast, and I so much hate having to expand threads and click on the next page and such. It's *amazing* how much info you could read and process quickly on Usenet.

Then, of course, the spammers got to it. Sigh.