Reflections on the early Internet days.
"Eternal September is a slang term that refers to the time period of the Internet since September 1993, when Usenet saw its heaviest influx of newbies into the newsgroups."
— KnowYourMeme
I remember the slow transition from bulletin boards via FIDOnet to the new-fangled Internet. I remember using FTP from MS-DOS and the Unix command line. I remember USENET and Pine mail. I remember using ViolaWWW¹ and I recall when NCSA Mosaic was released. I remember the start of the Eternal September. I remember a time before Google. I remember feeling that the Internet was going to change the world for the better because far more people would have access to repositories of information;
learning and communication would be available to the masses and the disadvantaged would have a more level playing field.
It was at this time that I was taking an "Access" course to bring my weaker skills up to speed prior to entering University. I was also teaching Information Technology, remedial English and writing classes at a local tertiary college (community college, sorta). The internet was a wonderful resource. I learned all about WordPerfect macros and how to make them. I learned about how operating systems worked, and how to make the best use of them. I discovered newsgroups, joined many of them and read countless technical threads. I asked what I hoped were smart questions about computer tech and software. I posted a lot on uk.rec.sheds because those people were hilarious. I discovered alt.binary groups and downloaded an Imperial Shitload of software of dubious origin (and belatedly, ant-virus software).
The internet (indeed a computer!) at home was still a rarity and many folk relied on the free AOL cds to get access to it for a few hours a month. In the UK, Demon Internet was a little too expensive for me (and besides that my wife would have killed me over the phone bill). So I did everything in college labs and the library. Then I got into University shortly after the World Wide Web became a Thing. There were finally good browsers for both Windows and Unix, so all the Uni labs had access.
Now as a mature student (also one who'd been using the 'net for a while) it was amusing to me to watch what the freshers did. Our intake was mostly males around 18, with a couple of us being in our late twenties and thirties. Several times a week someone would be caught doing what 18-year-old males have always done; trying to locate porn. Whilst the IT Department had a clear set of rules and guidelines on internet use, it was understood that only the most egregious aubuses would be punished, so it fell to the student body itself to police what was being accessed, and then only if it was public and likely to cause offence.
This is not to say that there weren't some major upsets and humorous incidents. A pair of lads decided one day that they were going to seek out "some titties" and sure enough, for a few minutes there were boyish giggles in a corner of the room, and everyone knew what was going on. Suddenly there was a tactile stillness, enough that several heads popped up. A couple of us, braver souls, walked over to have a gander and the source of this guilty, shamed silence was clear. On the screen, a full-colour farmyard diorama. Two women and a horse, doing what neither should be doing, and which I had not imagined possible or desirable. These lads were simply staring, slack of jaw and oblivious to the rest of the world. Their shock was tangible, the horror on their faces clear to all. Someone reached over and closed the browser window. The boys returned to the world. A couple of us suggested they go and take a break while we sorted things out. Browser histories, image caches and bookmarks were cleared, the offending account logged out. Only then did we all laugh, albeit uncomfortably. The fallout from this was predictable. The two lads had the shame nicknames of "pony boy". Certain sites got blocked and there was a zero tolerance policy put into place and we all had to sign up to it. For the pony boys the age of innocence was over.
Beard Research and other oddities
As I mentioned earlier, these were the days before Google, indeed before real search engines as we know them. There was Gopher of course, but that wasn't optimised for the WWW. There were user-curated catalogs of useful and intriguing pages, and it was on one of these that I remember finding one particular site, and one page in particular stuck out for some reason. For years I kept the memory of this place, and a few days ago was suddenly reminded of it again.
The page in question was simply titled "Beard Research", and could be found in the personal pages of one Pete Hickey at the University of Ottowa. Nowadays of course, the original is gone, but the conversation I'd had made me see if I could find it again. With a few vague memories of the page contents, I tracked it down to the excellent Internet Archive, here². I really have no idea of why this site in particular stuck in my head after thirty-some years, but it did. I is maybe because it hailed back to those early, innocent days of the 'net. This was a fellow who wrote his site himself, as everyone had to. He'd fired up emacs or vim and read some stuff about HTML and done it. It was personal, his alone. This was what the early internet was about to me. It was quirky, it was clever, it was interesting. Here was a lecturer in Ottowa who wanted to share his odd experiment into facial hair with a curious world.
I ski (XC) in the winter. I run in the winter. I cycle in the winter. I have a beard. People have been saying, "A beard keeps you warmer."
Sure it sounds good, but has anybody ever really tested this theory? In the interest of science, I thought of cutting off my beard for a winter to determine if it would be colder without it. Thinking about it for a while, I realized that this was no good. Maybe it would be a warmer (colder) winter this year. Maybe I would forget how cold (warm) it was last year.
I needed a control! Another person was no good; their perception of cold may not agree with mine. I had only one choice. Shave half of my beard.
The man sounded fascinating. I wanted to have a beer with him, hear his stories. Above all I wanted to hear the rest of the story. Had he continued the experiment? How had other people responded? It was the first time I'd wanted to reach out to a complete stranger just to pick their brains.
In due course, other search catalogs came to my attention (I remember using W3Catalog) and finally, people started to develop web spiders and true full-text search engines sprang into being. The first I remember clearly was Webcrawler, and later on came Lycos and Yahoo!. As home internet users came to be more numerous, slowly things began to shift from supporting the more technically proficient and patient students and academics to the more demanding and less able souls. These folk of course also wanted their own web pages, their own email addresses. They wanted flashy sites that looked good. Lacking the will to learn HTML and the ways of the Web, they needed someone else to provide the tools for them. Out of this grew Geocities. No longer was the deeper knowledge needed.
Geocities and the like were the first to provide an outlet for people to leave their mark on the web. The AOLers came in droves to fill the void, and with them came their family stories and tales of woe, their wonderfully crackpot theories, their creative genius, their religious and political ideals, their hopes and fears and occasionally, their narrow-minded hatred and conspiracy theories. As they had upset and trolled people on Usenet, now they could do so to a wider audience. Their content and their guestbooks (remember them?) could be a delight or a downer to read, raising your hopes or trampling them with hateful invective. But on the whole they could still be ignored, after all.
I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I had a Geocities account. I'm quite proud to tell you that I wrote it by hand in a text editor. I'm ashamed to tell you of the hours I spent creating image maps and hunting for animated gifs. If you can find this site (and it's archived out there) feel free to praise or mock me. Later, once broadband became a thing and my skills and needs grew, I moved on to host my own website using Geeklog. By this time I had a network of my own at home; two towers (named Isengard and Orthanc), a desktop ("Shire") and eventually a laptop ("Guiness", named for my cat). I had my own domain and would regularly update my blog. This was about the time I discovered E2 and my username was fixed for all time.
Of course a little later than this came Facebook, and while I signed up to get in touch with some old schoolchums, I quickly realised that it was a privacy nightmare and ad-ridden home of hellspawn content that could be pushed to me against my will. And this is where I leave the new internet. I try to avoid sites that plunder my identity and sell it to others.
So now I sit in a café writing this over an espresso, on a laptop I'd have killed for twenty years ago, and I miss those halcyon days. I feel like a hobbit, only as well as food and shelter I also need a broadband connection.
Hazelnut says The glory days of the online world died in 2007 when Faceache became accessible to non students and the iPhone came out. It's been downhill since then. Geocities at least had the skill wall of needing to know HTML to stick things on. Now every loudmouth and narcissist can spray their musk on social media, and it's all just a series of corporatised, bland, fiefdoms.
¹ https://web.archive.org/web/19991013000059/http://viola.org/
² Of course there's something on Reddit about it!
Iron node 18
$ xclip -o | wc -w
1679