Watching retrocomputing videos about pre-WWW Internet is so weird when they weren't there at the time, trying to recreate it.

"The Internet was text only!"

No, it wasn't. NCSA programs for Macintosh & Unix were graphical, Fetch had the adorable running dog. (I can't get Infinitemac.org online, or I'd show you there, so here's a weird Bulgarian screenshot)

On dialup with PPP, I did prefer text on Unix for speed, but if I came into the labs I used X11 or Macintosh.

#retrocomputing #Internet

Modern software is such absolute bullshit.

Here I'm typing into a glorified guestbook form field for a web page. I do have a few Mastodon client apps, but I only bother on mobile where the web page is unacceptably slow, and crucially, the few Mac desktop apps for Mastodon are shitty and unfinished (sorry guy).

I should be using something like MarsEdit or old NetNewsWire (again sorry, I hate the new one so much), with a solid rich text UI and clicky roundrect buttons instead of mushy links.

Fun in the olden times, here's an archive of what was on umich.edu's FTP server, under atari:

https://archive.org/details/umich-atari-archive

PDF file is a reasonable view of the enormous text file index, except it doesn't list the 8bit stuff (which is in the zip).

Wow, I remembered arc/lzh, but forgot about .zoo archives. I have no way to read these now, except to put them in Hatari's folder and unzoo from the ST. I don't remember msa at all.

#retrocomputing #atari

It took 45s to download the entire thing. That would've been hours, days, maybe weeks to leech back then.

First file: 00anyoneouthere00

Updated: 12 Nov 04: I guess a lot of you are still out there. Awesome! Have fun! - Jeff

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Is anyone out there reading this? If so, drop me a line:
weiner@terminator.rsug.itd.umich.edu

@mdhughes "No it was not". Yes, it was. Notice "pre-WWW" in the text.

@pavel Fetch & NCSA programs were 1989. xrn (read news) was 1990-ish. Mosaic was 1993. We were not primitives banging rocks on a teletype before TBL, he came in late with an arguably shittier thing that got popular.

Do not speak the deep magic to me, witch, I was there when it was written.

@mdhughes Well, Internet was 1980-ish and X11 are 1985-ish, so... :-)