imaginarycircus: notmissmarple: heidi8: Oh, please. We had…
Oh, please. We had Internet in the 90s. I had it *in* 1990.
Now, the 80s? They didn’t have very much Internet, and none of it had a graphical interface, but we had email and bulletin boards and tic tac toe and Global Thermonuclear War!
(I think I need to do a picspam of Gifs Of The Internet In 80s Movies.)
We didn’t have it until 1994 (I think?). But seriously.
(and yes, you totally should)
I was on Prodigy BBS in late 1990. I poked around Usenet on and off. I remember when Alta Vista because the big fancy search engine in early 1996. I started buying books from Amazon in 1996. So there was like 10 months of the 90s in which I didn’t have the internet. OK. You got me.
I’m pretty sure I was reading Usenet posts as early as 1987 or so, though it would have been via gateways to local BBSs that I accessed via direct dial-up connections. It’s a pretty arbitrary distinction, but I don’t count access to store-and-forward content as “real” Internet (although my early BBS experiences were compelling as hell). And I tend to exclude the big gated-community online services of the time like Compuserve for the same reason, even though they usually had some version of Usenet and Internet email.
I was regularly using telnet across the “real” Internet by 1992 or thereabouts, but it was still a pretty weird subversive thing to be doing, and it was a few more years before the Web started taking off and you could talk to ordinary people about it without having to explain what you even meant.
Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/47026130361.
