Screeching Modems & Text-Based Adventures: My Pioneering Pre-HTTP Internet Playground

Alright, tech adventurers! Let’s crank up the time machine and head back to the era before the internet was all glossy graphics and endless streaming. I’m talking about the glorious days of dial-up, when the modem was our trusty steed, and cyberspace was a vast, uncharted territory of text-based wonder. Forget about misery; this was a time of pure, unadulterated digital exploration!

Before the reign of HTTP, the internet was a playground of unique services, each with its own quirky charm. It was less like a shopping mall and more like a bizarre carnival – full of oddities and unexpected treasures:

• Finger: The OG digital “Hello, World!”, finger is a social media profile written in plain text, where a simple .plan file could reveal a user’s passions. Who needed fancy profiles when we had ASCII art bios?

** Explaination of .plan file from the archives:

the .plan file in a user's home directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and self-expressive purposes...

excerpt from The Jargon File 4.4.8 (2003)

A recent innovation in plan files has been the introduction of “scrolling plan files” which are one-dimensional animations made using only the printable ASCII character set, carriage return and line feed, avoiding terminal specific escape sequences, since the finger command will (for security reasons; see letterbomb) not pass the escape character.

Scrolling .plan files have become art forms in miniature, and some sites have started competitions to find who can create the longest running, funniest, and most original animations.

• DNS: Turning hard to remember numbers into words, making the world wide web accessible. Started as a single file that was physically transferred between the first “nodes” on the ARPANetInformation Superhighwayternet!. We’ll deep dive on this in another article, I’ll link here when it’s posted.

• Gopher: Think of it as a text-based treasure map. We navigated through menus, each one leading to a new digital secret. It wasn’t flashy, but it was effective, and it made finding things a real quest. cortland.edu information on Gopher as a placeholder until I write my own.

• WAIS: The first taste of truly searching online. It was like an early version of Google, but with a lot more character. Every query was a gamble, but finding that one relevant text file felt like striking gold.

• IRC: The original online hangout. Channels were our digital campfires, where we shared stories, made friends, and occasionally got into spirited debates (it’s hard to stay mad over text). It was our digital saloon, complete with its own unique slang. It’s still alive and well all over, doing who knows what :D. freenode.net probably one of the first “IRC” servers I connected to.

• Usenet: A sprawling bulletin board where ideas clashed, arguments raged, and communities were born. It was the wild frontier of online discussions, where you could find just about anything – for better or for worse.

This too is still alive and well. As always, it’s got everything you could ever want to download and read, probably stuff you don’t want to.

• alt.binaries.*
• alt.bbs
• ** alt dot almost anything **
• comp.os.msdos.*
• comp.graphics.*
• rec.games
• alt.sex - it aint got nothing on the smut that is so readily available. No shame, just saying… Times have changed, hope people adapt. Think liveleaks… any number of site.

• UUCP: The quiet hero, making it all possible. This system, using dial-up, enabled email and file transfers between Unix systems. It was like a digital Pony Express, but more techy. Unix-to-Unix-CoPy.

• SMTP, POP3, IMAP: Our trusty email delivery system. These protocols were the unsung heroes, ensuring our messages got to their destinations, even if it took a bit longer than today. These are some of the first protocols I learned are are still widely used today, especially SMTP

• NTP: Making sure that our adventure was all on the same timezone, keeping things in sync was key.

My Dial-Up Odyssey:

Accessing this world was an adventure in itself. You didn’t just click a button and poof you were online; it took a bit of skill and patience. It all started with:

1. Firing up the computer – that Windows 95 startup sound was like the theme song for our digital quest.
2. Launching the modem dialer, carefully entering the sacred phone number and password to connect to Delphi.
3. Listening to the modem’s beautiful (and slightly chaotic) symphony of connection tones.
4. Then, if luck was on our side, a “Connected to Delphi!” message. That’s like the “we’re off!” for the adventure.
5. Exploring Delphi’s world, sending emails, exploring forums, and diving into chat rooms. Things may have moved slowly, but each click was an act of exploration.

The Thrill of Text-Based Discovery:

Let’s be clear: this wasn’t a miserable experience, this was a pioneering one! It was a world where text was our canvas, and our imaginations were our paintbrushes. Every link was a portal to a new world, every message was a chance to connect. It was a slower pace, but it was more meaningful because we made it that way.

The pre-HTTP internet was our digital playground, a place where we learned to navigate a new frontier, to build communities, and to connect with people from around the world. It was challenging, it was quirky, and it was utterly amazing.

So, let’s not forget our dial-up roots. Let’s remember the excitement of those early connections, the thrill of exploring unknown text-based worlds, and the satisfaction of mastering a new technology. We weren’t just users; we were pioneers.

What were your adventures in dial-up cyberspace? Share your stories below! Let’s celebrate our digital heritage!