Tim May wrote:
I wouldn't give a _shred_ of credit to AOL, and even less to CompuServe. They were drags, in fact.
For internet access? Fuck no. That wasn't their purpose at all... Back in those days, I remember having a shell account at school, and SLIP had just come out. Someone had written a small program that would allow users to run SLIP from userland and turn a dial-up shell into a net connection. The sysadmins everywhere frowned upon this. Eventually, $20/month with X hours limit accounts started showing up. Things that used to be BBS's (running FIDO as a message transport) slowly turned into internet pops. Usually, your $20 bought you a shell account, an email address, and PPP access. As the script kiddies got bolder and the laziness of the sysadmins and developers started to show, the shell accounts went away. More and more people started offering unlimited network access, but busy signals put a limit on that. Back to AOL. I remember them from the latter Commodore 64 days. They were Q-Link back then. This was a time when BBS's were the rule, and toward the end, before the internet killed most of them off. The better ones such as Searchlight used ANSI text editors and menus, some had tree like message structures - much like usenet, and some even carried a few newsgroups. Way before this in the late eighties, I got into BBS's when modems were 300bps. Yes, oh yes, they were very slow, but it was quite manageable. You could read the text as it was delivered. If you listened into the conversation, you could actually discern one character from the next. Not that I could tell an "A" character apart from a "B" character, but I could tell that one had been sent, and then another, and then a third, etc. If you tried to immitate a carrier, some stupid modems would try to handshake with you. Going from 300 to 1200 was fun. :) It's how I learned to speed read. After 2400 and 14.4, I could no longer keep up with the text... The next level was of course Fido, and in some cases getting usenet content and email over uucp dial up networks. :) Ah, the fun of long chains of host names separated by slashes, and the strange IP like fidonet node numbers.... Going back to the later and more final versions of the BBS world... there were a few graphical standards coming out for BBS's. Most notably was the RIPScript code which had a new line followed by a pipe and an exclamation as its escape code sequence. Unlike ANSI codes which were (and still are for VT100 emulation) ESC followed by an open square bracket, these could be sent via email, so you could send pictures of a sort over 7 bit ascii systems and change colors, etc. HTML email's features is not much different from this -- except for the ability to link to urls, (and more recently with JavaScript -- infect you with viruses) which I don't think (or recall) RIPScript had. Back in those days AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, and GEnie did have a place. They were really pay for content services in disguise. You could do stock research, get research info, access encyclopedias, etc. This was before CD's were widely available and made such things accessible to the public for cheaper. There were also lots and lots of file forums where one could get files that were not available elsewhere - not even via FTP. Though, eventually these leaked to ftp servers by kind souls who passed them on to the net. I remember getting the first issues of Wired articles off AOL -- yes, I did have the dead tree versions for sure, but it was a nice thing to be able to read just the text (this wasn't html) without the purple neon on light green background and orange dots... Yes, there was also the New York Times, which wasn't yet on the web as there wasn't a fully developed web yet... Yes, AOL et al were indeed dragged into providing internet access, but of all the services, AOL became the slime. Their marketting campaigns of give away disks in every nook and cranny, of delivering more floppies and later CD's than were people in the USA was telling -- especially when their networks could not handle the load of the traffic. Soon after, they started popping up with dialog boxes asking you to buy stuff. I recall logging on a few weeks after not accessing AOL, and receiving tons of pop-up offers, and having to decline them all one at a time. I wonder how many clicked "Yes" by accident and received junk they didn't want. Then, as Cantor and Seigall flooded the net and opened up spamming, my mailbox became saturaged with trash. Now mind you, I didn't give out those email addresses (screen names) to very many people - just friends. So the only explanation to the flood of spam was simply that AOL had sold its subscriber lists out. Compuserve was also a very pricey fucked up place. You paid through the nose for just getting on, and then some for the extras. And those idiotic comma separated email addresses weren't helping. Hell, I cancelled that account, and they had the balls to send me bills telling me that the credit card company had not honored their charges after two months of them billing me illegally... (Back then Visa was good about not honoring subscriptions when the service had been notified to terminate the service but din't.) I didn't call it CrapUserve for nothing... Around this time, the SIG's I was after - most notably getting Apple OS upgrades and software for my Newton were of little value at those price points as plenty of ftp sites started carrying around the content, and more over, places like Wallnut Creek and other ftp site archivers started to offer - pricey CD's full of the archives I sought after. Sure, they cost $40 or so, but it was much cheaper in bulk than downloading all that at 9600 or 14.4. This was a time of shareware, not freeware. The Open Source movent was around, but didn't take off until the Linux kernel came out -- I recall booting 0.92 off a 5.25" disk and wondering "Hey, this is awesome, but other than ls, mkdir, cat, more and cd, what's the point." :) Yes, I recall spending nearly $400 for a piece of shit clamshell 1X SCSI CDROM for my Mac, and man it was so much slower than the hard drives, they were nearly floppy speed. But then having picked up Project Guttenberg's latest CD, I could now read tons and tons of books -- more than I had shelf space for. And as a bonus, I got the usual world Atlas (never mind that today you can get street maps on CD's!) a dictionary/thesaurus and a cheesy encyclopedia. (Back in those days every parent was sold on feeding their kids Britannica and the cheaper versions. To get it on CD was really something.) By 94 or so, I did use Mosaic and Cello and Trumpet Winsock on Win31 to get to the first of the web pages. Most of the "web" was really gopher and ftp sites, but here and there a web server was to be found. I honestly spent more time in Telnet (yes, not ssh as it hadn't been written yet!) using pine and trn than surfing pages... Another factor that IMHO had a big change on catalizing the web to be what it is now are portable electronic cameras such as the Apple QuickTake's, and good image editing software such as Photoshop... You could now post pix of your friends on the net, and that's what most of the home pages were. Descriptions of people, their pets and their hobbies. Not ads full of flashing junk. Sure, not much content either but much friendlier than in your face pop up javascript windows full of offers or blinking flaming banner ads asking you to punch the monkey or looking like a button or text search field... Now a days, I surf with a desktop firewall and a junkbuster, and over several hundred email filters to get rid of the spam and ads, javascript junk, cookies and shit. Sure, the 'zine's and paper sites where I read my news/articles from make money off these, but I don't want to see them. Let the fools who can't or don't know how to shut them off be advertised to. I hate ads. I'm not claiming they should be illegal mind you, but I claim to reserve the right to not display them on my screen by choice. And of course having a desktop firewall in a corporate environment where the desktops were run by total morons who barely knew what Windowze was didn't think to install a firewall, was a great boon. (Yes, that was a run on, no, I don't give a fuck.) After a while I stopped looking at the logs. There were ridiculous attempts on our networks every few seconds. Too many to count, or care about... But this is the 'net today. Full of the "bad guys" who are providing yet another horse for the TLA's, and full of the negligent and ignorant who don't know they are there. Full of banner ads and privacy invading cookies subsidizing content. -- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------