What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

Re:What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life be... by jpatokal on Sunday August 28, 2016 @09:12AM (#12376360)

I had access to the Internet long before I got a mobile phone, and it was fascinating, but it didn't rock my world in the same way. This was the Internet before HTTP, browsers and search engines: email was store-and-forward via UUCP (look it up), files were stored in FTP, indexing was via Gopher, and access to it all was via pay-per-minute long distance dial up to girlfriend's mom's account at a VAX box at a university using, erm, borrowed credentials. Using the trusty old card index at the local library was both faster and had much higher bandwidth, and things only really started to change when Mosaic and Alta Vista arrived on the scene.

I agree that smartphones are another revolution of comparable magnitude, but that started less than ten years ago: we don't even have a first fully-grown up post-smartphone generation yet.

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Re:What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life be... by Falkon1313 on Sunday August 28, 2016 @02:35PM (#12377767)

My experience was a bit different. The local university had open-access dial-in numbers, from which you could telenet anywhere, use FTP, Gopher, IRC, Usenet, Archie, Veronica, WAIS, MUDs, email lists, dialout to BBSes, etc. We had lots of informational (and opinion) content, search, newsfeeds with comments, games, chat, and socialization. The main things we didn't have much of were e-commerce, ads, and images/audio/video. My career, many of my hobbies, and lifelong relationships came from that early internet. So it was a life-changer for me.

Mobile phones, on the other hand, didn't change much. Before them, we used the ubiquitous payphones when needed. Beepers briefly became a fad, but that faded out even before mobile phones became common; most people just didn't need constant telephone availability.

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