OneAndOneIs2

I went to University in September 1995 to study Applied Biochemistry. Four years later, I added the letters "BSc (hons)" to the end of my name. (Actually, that's a lie, I've never written them. But I could if I wanted.) In the meantime, I discovered the Internet.

There were a lot of Windows PCs on the Uni. network. They were, of course, very popular with everybody, but utterly useless for web browsing. The more things change...

Alternatively, there was the "Sun room" - a room full of machines with MASSIVE monitors that was almost always at least half-empty. These machines, of course, were the *Nix ones and booted to a very simple WM with a blue background and grey toolbars - there was no KDE, Gnome, Qt or GTK back then to pretty up *Nix desktops.

Even on these machines, the Web wasn't nearly as "built-in" an experience as it is today. You had to enter the command "use web" in a terminal before you could get a browser, for starters. But telnet, ping, IRC, and so forth were all available...

After use webing, you could run Netscape. Version one. If you were l33t like me, you soon discovered that you could, in fact, also run the beta of Netscape version two.

Commercial web pages were almost nonexistent back then. The web's content was massively more geek-made. Collaborative software like Wikipedia and the like was also nonexistent, so you had thousands of independant sites that stole shamelessly from each other. There was no Google, so there were quite a few search engines vying for business.

To start with at least, mostly I looked up jokes - there were a LOT of these - and worked on my own web page. Ye Gods, I was bad at this. Every time I learned a new bit of HTML, it HAD to be included. I had a textured blue wallpaper, yellow text, animated GIFs (that you could only view with Netscape 2), a scrolling message at the bottom of the browser (courtesy of Java and again needing Netscape 2), you name it.

Web comics were in their infancy - the first one I discovered was in '99, it was Bruno the Bandit, and I was impressed but mystified as to why anybody would do something like that.

Music was sort of available, but with slower network speeds and no MP3 compression, you had to wait ten minutes to hear a 3-minute song. The Sun machines could only play .au files, so when I discovered an "80s archive" with dozens of such music tracks on it, it got a lot of hits from me. Sadly, the song files were so large that I couldn't save them to disc - I only had a couple of MB storage on the network..

It was before the RIAA got worried about music piracy, tho, so it never even occurred to us that there was anything wrong with downloading music to listen to it...

The Web was smaller and far less useful back then, as I said, so the browser was a much less important part of the Internet experience than it is today. Most particularly, telnet was vastly more used back then. telnet, and MUDs - "Multi-user dungeons", they were originally role-playing games, but then started to become popular for chatting on too. After all, they were much better moderated than IRC or Yahoo's infant chat software... And MSN? Hah! Microsoft didn't even have their own browser yet!

I found a couple of MUDs to chat on - COLD, or "Castle of Lost Dreams" was one, a MUD with links to the "alt.good.morning" Usenet group. With a friend, I started one of our own a few years later - it was great, you could even have fights on it :)

Every now and again our DNS server would fall over, so I got into the habit of connecting to MUDs via their IP address instead of their .com - the IP address worked all the time, after all. I had quite a few IP addys memorised back then. I don't know any now. Sad...

In my second year, I got a Linux PC courtesy of a friend who was doing physics. I knew nothing about FOSS etc, as far as I was concerned it was Unix if it was on a mainframe, and Linux if it was on a PC. That was the only difference. Oh, except that you got the Doom demo installed free with Linux, and it was nowhere to be found on the Suns

I discovered Hotmail sometime in the first or second year.. Long before Microsoft got their paws on it. I only really set it up because I couldn't get to my university email when not actually at university. This would change later, courtesy of being granted external access permission, which meant I could telnet (SSH? What was that?) to university from home via my 56K modem, and then run elm, my favourite email client, via that shell. In fact, courtesy of "screen", one of my all-time favourite apps, I could leave elm running 24/7, along with the lynx web browser - important when the lagmonster was running amok - connections to MUDs, and various other things too, and just reattach the session upon logging in from wherever.

Slowly, the Web became more and more useful and useable, and the Internet became steadily less CLI-friendly. I went from saying "They might have a web page" to "It might be on their web page" to "Just go to the web page, it'll have it." Google replaced AltaVista as my default search engine. Internet Explorer appeared. Java became more powerful, Flash made its debut, MPEG compression came along. Less and less non-geeks looked at me with a puzzled and slightly glazed expression when I mentioned the World-Wide Web.

Along with the increase in less-skilled web users came a few nasties. Spam email and annoying advertising were the biggies. Back in the early days, we had no spam filters, no adblock extensions, and we didn't need them. As the number of users increased to the point that it became worth targeting, that changed.

The Web, like the OSes I accessed it from, was crude, primitive, and very much text-based when I started out with it. I created my homepage with nothing but the Pico text editor, and I would use Lynx as often as Netscape to browse. Email and chatting were both done via the command-line - who had the bandwidth to put graphics in, after all?

People who didn't really get online until the "Web 2.0" days would probably have found the Web in those days useless and unusable. I liked it, though. I liked using FVWM to run multiple xterms to do all my Internet things. I liked the simplicity of editing HTML (compared to today's PHP-based behemoths, such as this blog). I liked that just about everybody you met online was a geek at heart and could give a reasonably good answer to the question "What's the difference between the Web and the Internet?"

It was crude, but it was fun. It lost a lot of that fun when it got polished up and became so massively commercially important. In the same way as home-built go-karts with engines scavenged from lawnmowers are far more fun than a production car can ever be.

No Google, no wikis, no youtube, no iTunes. But no spam, no popup ads, no chatroom bots. The Web is certainly bigger. It's hard to argue that it isn't also better. But I still think it sacrificed a lot of its charm to get where it is today.