IN OTHER NEWS

[patsplat@open-ground.org]

@blogdiva technically a local bbs, but my real favorite was ytalk at university.

Once I stood in line waiting for my turn at the terminal watching a girl break up with someone live via ytalk. Such angry typing.

[jf_718@mas.to]

@blogdiva @JoBlakely Same - in college on Sparcstation/SunOS (before Solaris was a thing). I still used gopher/pine/vi/emacs if I was using the far more numerous text terminals (there were only a few of the above workstations) - to this day I still have a soft spot for DEC VT220s.

[robotdiver@starlite.rodeo]

@blogdiva

I don't remember what I used first, but I still remember writing code on Texas Instrument computers in Basic that made turtles run across the screen. I think I was maybe 10 or 11. I'd save up to get code books from Scholastic. I think that was around the same time I learned how to output ascii art to a printer.

[robotdiver@starlite.rodeo]

@blogdiva

I'm guessing it was Usenet, but not until maybe 92-93, when I had access to a computer in senior high. Spent a lot of time on BBS servers at my friend's house in junior high.

[dan@axillae.telent.net]

@patsplat @blogdiva the great thing about ytalk was it was endian-independent, so you could ytalk a Vax from a Sun

[ericfielding@mastodon.social]

@blogdiva My college had a mainframe computer with a chat program that was connected to at least one other college back in 1978. Not exactly the Internet.

[nmo@tilde.zone]

@quinn It's generally weird to hear The Beatles originals as someone who didn't grow up in a Beatles house hold.

[climatejenny@biodiversity.social]

@blogdiva For oldsters, y’all have good memories! I don’t remember the protocol (if I ever knew) but about 48 years ago, when, as a girl, I pioneered getting into “stranger danger” via computers using the instant messaging function of a dial-up PDP-11.

[lysdexic@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva
Finger, chatting up boys from other universities. I was bad at it.

Dammit, not finger, phone.

[whitneymcn@mastodon.xyz]

@blogdiva Ooh, my friends and I started with local BBSes in the mid-80s -- a friend's older brother had a 1200 baud modem!

It was Usenet and Gopher that put me on the internet.

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva SLiP. A local university had a dial-in that allowed you to launch SLiP and get a nice little connection. Suddenly I could use Mosaic. Once that happened, the BBS that I used to run always had a busy tone. 🫠

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva @FeloniousPunk ... I haven't stopped downloading music. Strangely most of the music I download was released in 1975-1985.

[paradegrotesque@mastodon.sdf.org]

@blogdiva

14400,8,n,1

[miah@hachyderm.io]

@blogdiva I should note that the dial-in dropped you to a shell menu and I could use Archie, Gopher, and Pine, or drop to the shell easily. And while exploring with Archie and Gopher was interesting, Mosaic really changed it all for me.

Before that I was dialing up long distance BBS's and snagging cool tfiles, warez, and OS/2 stuff.

[lambdacalculus@masto.hackers.town]

@blogdiva BBSes starting in 1992, so... 33 years?

I did discover Gopher and Usenet about a year or so later.

[woozle@toot.cat]

@blogdiva I remember being shown how to text from a text-terminal at Brown to someone at Yale (friend of a friend) in, mustabin, 1986? 1987?

Also, had email as an employee starting in 1985 or 1986 -- but it only went between universities until 1989.

...and then everything changed, when the .com Nation (CompuServe et al.) attacked.

Anyway, you apparently beat me by a couple of years ^.^

[quinn@social.circl.lu]

@nmo It's never too late to get a good education

[jmelesky@tinylad.social]

@blogdiva@mastodon.social My first was the dialup service Prodigy in 90 or 91, which I believe used its own protocol (it definitely used its own image formats). Technically only a small slice of it was the internet (just email, iirc), but I used that bit, so it counts.

I remember being envious of CompuServe users because they had the "cb simulator" (early text-only chatrooms).

There was a brief period in the 90s where having a 7-letter last name was, well, not "cool", exactly, but maybe "convenient in a neat way". So many usernames had a technical cap at 8 characters and "first initial last name" was such a common way for organizations to assign usernames.

[quinn@social.circl.lu]

@nmo (I'm very much a believer in the lucky 10,000 principle!)

[revndm@queer.cool]

@blogdiva gopher is so simple, so beautiful…