Reliving the Glory Days

I've recently been inspired by a couple of YouTube channels - The 8-bit Guy, The Serial Port and clabretro - to relive the glory days of my youth and the infancy of the Internet. I grew up in the 1980s and 1990s when the Internet was just getting going - when the folks creating web sites on the likes of GeoCities could create sites every bit as good as major corporations, when e-mail was cutting edge, and when AOL Instant Messenger was how kids spent their free time. Those were the glory days.

I have a lot of nostalgia about that time, and some memories tied to how I explored this new digital, online world, and, as I've watched those YouTube channels explore some of the really fun things like setting up a dial-up ISP, or configuring a Sun Sparc server, I had a strong desire to recreate some of the things that I used to do, as well.

And, of course, the question becomes: How can I make my retelling of my story unique? After all, those other YouTubers are already making those videos, so why should anyone pay attention to another guy doing much the same? Maybe no one will pay attention, and that's fine - the journey is primarily for me. But, in case other folks are interesting, I did come up with some ways that my recollecting of my experiences might be unique:

• I intend to write it out as much as possible, and I don't even know if I'll make videos. Maybe I will at some point - that's never really been my thing, but, who knows.
• I intend to write out the steps in great detail, so that others can reproduce it.
• While many of the other channels are focused on procuring real hardware - things like Cisco 2600 series routers, line cards, terminal servers, Sun servers, etc. - I intend to recreate it with as much realism as possible in a virtual world. While that may sound like it isn't really reliving the past, I think it may be more accessible for others, and, hey, it's what I can do - I don't have the resources or attic/basement/closet space to procure a bunch of old hardware.
• The other reason it's okay to do it virtually is that my nostalgia has more to do with how it looked to me, the end user, and not how it was implemented by a provider. While I certainly plan to dig into the back-end details of setting up proxy, mail, dial-up servers, etc., I didn't do any of that as a primary school kid in the 90s. I was just a user, and I'll be more focused on the items that help replicate what it was like as a user.

In addition to replicating and reliving my early Information Age experiences, I'd also like to explore some of the technologies that I was not given access to. I was a user of early Apple production (IIe, Mac Classic, Performa) and then early IBM PC-compatible platforms (DOS 6 + Windows 3.1, Windows 95/98, XP), and some Intel-based Linux distributions (Red Hat 6). My exploration of some of the retro YouTube channels has opened my eyes to some of the platforms that, for a combination of reasons, I completely missed - things like the Commodore platform, BASIC, OS/2. Many of these are available as downloads and can be run on Intel-compatible hardware, either directly or in readily-available emulators (Qemu).

I couldn't tell you exactly where I was the first time I experienced the Internet, but I can come pretty close. It was sometime in the mid-1990s - probably 1995 or 1996. I lived in Colorado at the time, and visited a library, there, in the Highlands Ranch area, where they had just revamped their technology and had a bank of brand-new computers with Internet access. I was a huge SimCity fan, and I somehow found myself on the maxis.com site browsing their information related to SimCity. I remember that they had some audio files you could download - WAV or MIDI, can't remember which - along with graphics related to the game. The audio files, now, that was fantastic - I left the library that day determined to find ways to download those files at home (remember, this is pre-USB - there were no thumb drives, and I hadn't thought to bring a floppy disk to the library with me that day).

At home, my family had not purchased any sort of a dial-up connection. CompuServe was up and going by that point, and all of the cool/rich people had AOL accounts, but my family hadn't pulled the trigger on that, yet. I remember trying to convince my parents that we could just use the 400 free hours that AOL was offering, and, they being much wiser than I, saw that for what it was: the ploy to get you to pay the $20 or $50 per month and tie up the phone line.

But, at the time, there was an organization in Colorado called ACLIN - Access Colorado Library and Information Network. ACLIN was essentially a way for libraries within the state of Colorado to share their catalogs over the nascent Internet, so that, at a single library within one district you could look up the catalogs of other libraries in the state. In addition to doing this at libraries they had a dial-up number you could use with a modem to access the system from a home/personal computer.

Turns out, the dial-up connection logged you into some sort of UNIX-type machine (probably Solaris, given that they went by the slogan "The Network is the Computer" - apparently now proudly owned by CloudFlare - and their early support of TCP/IP), which automatically started a "links" browser. Their goal was to send you to their web page, but, if you knew your way around links (or had a penchant for figuring it out, as I did), you could really access just about any web page you wanted. And, since everyone had the same type of web pages, they all rendered equally well in a text-only browser.

I was able to log on to ACLIN with my 1200 baud modem (externally connected via 25-pin serial port) and surf the web - including getting access to the maxis.com web page, and locate those coveted music files. A little more playing around, and I was able to figure out how to use Kermit to transfer those files over the text browser and 1200 baud modem to my local computer. It took HOURS to download them, but I had them.

Sometime concurrent with this, we had also installed the recently-launched Juno e-mail service, and our family had access to e-mail accounts, for free, without the need for AOL. In retrospect, I'm very thankful for my parents' foresight in eschewing AOL. Yeah, Juno was annoying, with it's AD-based approach to everything - cutting edge in the worst possible ways - but it was "free", and it was much lighter-weight than AOL, or at least stayed lighter-weight for longer than AOL.

Eventually my parents finally went the route of signing up for an ISP - we ended up with Earthlink, including an e-mail address and dial-up, moved to a 33,600 baud modem, upgraded to Windows 95, then 98, and on from there. At some point I ended up installing Linux and a small Ethernet network, and had things configured to the point where I actually had my Linux server set up to be a dial-up gateway - when another computer on the network would attempt to route to the Internet it would dial my ISP and make the connection automatically, and then disconnect after a set amount of time when the Internet traffic stopped.