One more post down memory lane. Phil Gyford chronicled his first few months online, thirty years ago in 1995. He talks of modems, floppies, email, Usenet, IRC, and friendly strangers on the internet.

I had forgotten how onerous it was to get online back then. Gyford writes:

It’s hard to convey how difficult it was to set things up. So new and alien to me. When reading computer magazines I’d always skipped articles about networking and while the computers at university had been connected together, that was only for the purposes of printing, scanning and transferring files.

First there was the issue of getting online at all. The Internet Starter Kit spent 59 pages explaining how to set up MacTCP, and PPP or SLIP, two different methods of connecting to the internet, the differences of which happily escape me now. I spent a lot of late nights fiddling with control panels and extensions, learning about IP addresses, domain name servers, etc.

And Gyford reminds us just how marvelous the invention of the internet was:

Before the web – and all the rest of it – how could you have shared your words with anyone? Write a letter to a newspaper or magazine and hope they published it a few days or months later? Create your own fanzine and distribute copies one-by-one to strangers, and posted in individually addressed and stamped envelopes? That was it, unless you were going to become a successful journalist or writer. Your reach, your world, was tiny.

But now, then, you could put anything you wanted on your own website and instantly it was visible by anyone in the world. OK, anyone in the world who was also online, which wasn’t many then, and they were all quite similar, but, still… they could be anywhere! And their number was growing.

And you could chat to people in real time and it didn’t matter where they were, they were here in front of you. Send emails back-and-forth to friends without writing letters, and buying stamps, and waiting days or weeks for a response. Instant! Weightless!

The post is worth a read. It’s complete with pictures of some artifacts from that time, including newspaper clippings, invoices, and journal entries.