The 90s Were a Crazy Time

A small thread about the crazy early 90s period, after the BBSes and Ham Radio, and before HTTP and the first Web Browser. 🧵

My first "paid" job in tech was managing a pool of US Robotics Courier modems connected to a Cisco router via RS232 at the University of Aveiro.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USRobotics

Students would dial in at up to 9600 baud speeds and get a shell prompt in an HP/UX Unix server (aka Zeus) for as long as their time-based quota allowed. Once their time expired, they'd be aggressively logged out (ATH0, NO CARRIER)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayes_com…

Once online using a modem and a serial terminal, they could spin a SLIP/SLiRP/SLuRP client on their Amiga/PC/Linux and the HP/UX and Boom, get TCP/IP over serial working end to end. 💥

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp aminet.net/package/comm/t…

Or they could launch the (x)Pad (Packet Assembler Disassembler) utility from the shell and access any X.25 (pre TCP/IP) connected server in the world. CompuServe US and others had X.25 addresses.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.25 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe docs.oracle.com/cd/E19069-01/s…

Once connected, they could d/l files using ZMODEM, (assuming Pad handled 8bit binary), or send emails using /bin/mail (pre Elm, Mutt) using UUCP bang paths (pre SMTP, pre DNS MX).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZMODEM en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elm_(emai… mutt.org

Or they could access global chat systems like QSD via X.25, Teletext, or Minitel (pre IRC, pre ICQ, pre XMPP, pre Messenger) and talk with people from all over the world in real-time.

spectrum.ieee.org/minitel-the-on… textfiles.com/hacking/qsd.txt

Using TCP/IP or X.25 to transfer data was unreliable and very expensive, though. Fortunately, there were other ways to download large (Kilobytes) remote files. One of them was using FTPmail servers.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTPmail

Universities tended to relax on email quotas. FTPmail allowed requesting remote files asynchronously using simple commands on email messages. The files were broken into smaller pieces, uuencoded, and sent to the recipient. Sunet anyone?

ftp.sunet.se/conspiracy/

Later, when TCP/IP overthrown X.25, things got sophisticated. Usenet, a network of discussion groups, glued together with the yet great NNTP protocol, emerged (pre Web bulletin boards and forums, pre Social networks).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_N… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Some groups (aka alt.binaries.*) were used to distribute binary files, mostly TIFF images (pre JPEG), split into 7-bit uuencoded (pre Base64, pre MIME, definitely pre NZB) messages.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIFF en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt.*_hie…

* We had nightly cron scripts running the alt.binaries.*, gluing and decoding the messages, and storing them in the file system (pre FTP archives). Dubious practice, but very popular. 😬

Then the Gopher protocol and client came along. It was the first global, distributed, hypertext-based system. It allowed browsing and searching information and clicking links to other documents (pre HTTP, pre Web, pre-Mosaic, the first Web Browser).

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(p…

The University of Aveiro had its Gopher server. Funny enough, the first Web Browsers, Mosaic and Netscape, supported the Gopher protocol for a while.

Oh, and before the IRC and Internet chat rooms, we telnet'ed to MUDs (multi-user dungeon) and MOOs, highly scriptable systems that combined role-playing with multi-user chat rooms.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUD_client en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO moosaico.com

This was all before HTTP was adopted and Mosaic, the first browser, came along. Layers of encapsulated protocols and hacks loosely glued together by thousands of enthusiasts learning and having fun. They had no clue how big and impactful the Web would come to be. 🔚