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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Saturday, August 27, 2022

4 comments:

Stephen said...

We had a young coed working at the library this past summer, and she and I got into the running joke of mocking the other's age. ("Was it very hard running away from dinosaurs all the time when you were a kid?") She was a techie, but surprised by the nature of the early internet: she had no idea, for instance, that we used to have to type in the actual URL of websites to access them instead of just googling "Yahoo" or whatever. For her, the address bar is and always has been the search bar.

CyberKitten said...

Oh, I remember the old days of dial-up Internet and hopping from site to site by links. No Google, No Yahoo, nothing. I think I started with AOL (free disc on a magazine cover), possibly AltaVista before moving onto Microsoft Internet Explorer. It was funny typing in URL's. If you got them wrong you sometimes ended up in some very interesting and unexpected places! I used to spend happy hours moving from URL to URL just to see where I'd end up... [grin]

Stephen said...

Oh, I vividly remember typing in www.whitehouse.com with total confidence that it would take me to a government website. It...did not. Back then a porn place owned the domain! O_O

Altavista was something other than a search engine? When I first got online, there were a lot of 'free' ISPs around. We used a LOT of them because they were trials, basically, and after so many hours they'd prompt you to pay. They usually used software to establish the connection, which monitored the time and showed ads. One of my first "clever boy" moments was realizing that I could copy the phone number from the software and establish a network connection through Windows' networking utility and avoid the caps & ads. :D

CyberKitten said...

I'm probably wrong about AltaVista. I must be thinking of something that sounded similar - maybe... [grin] I *think* I started with AOL (free trial) before finally settling on 'Demon Internet' as my ISP until it was snapped up by a larger company which was, in its turn, snapped up by an even bigger one! It was weird back then though... I remember downloading stuff (slowly!) that then had to be unpacked or translated into useful information. My first modem (I STILL love that handshake noise!) was 14.4K, then I went to 28.8 before hitting 56K just before I got broadband. What a difference THAT made! Now I'm getting 387Mbps which is pretty decent.