I'm So Old: Web Edition(davidwalsh.name)
davidwalsh.name
I'm So Old: Web Edition
https://davidwalsh.name/im-so-old-1
55 comments
I'm so old that the web was called "Gopher", and Google was called "archie", which indexed the filenames on anonymous FTP sites. Since most of the file were named with 8.3 conventions, it was pretty unclear what something was until you went there and downloaded it. I remember ftp.funet.fi having a lot of stuff, and it was pretty cool that you could download some stuff from the US government (I think I downloaded the budget one time for a student congress debate).
This, plus the Internet Oracle, and actually e-mailing to listservs for files to “download” and then uudecode out of mail message sequences.
ftp.funet.fi still exists, by the way :) Downloading a Linux distro or something from funet used to be a common way to measure your connection speed in Finland because you could be pretty damn sure the other end isn't going to be a bottleneck!
I way pre-date the web, so I guess I'm older than the author. I typed my first line of code into a teletype terminal connected to an HP3000 mainframe at my high school in 197... something... 6 I think.
Also I kind of think we old people should shut up about the whole "blink of an eye" thing. I've been guilty of it myself. Of course time didn't go by in the blink of an eye: it went by 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour. And of course you can't remember it all so looking back it seems like the years flew by, which they didn't. So we go around trying to make younger people feel a sense of urgency that they don't really need. What we should be saying is: slow down, take your time, enjoy, think it through, there's plenty of time. Oh, and ignore that old guy in the corner checking the time every 30 seconds.
Also I kind of think we old people should shut up about the whole "blink of an eye" thing. I've been guilty of it myself. Of course time didn't go by in the blink of an eye: it went by 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour. And of course you can't remember it all so looking back it seems like the years flew by, which they didn't. So we go around trying to make younger people feel a sense of urgency that they don't really need. What we should be saying is: slow down, take your time, enjoy, think it through, there's plenty of time. Oh, and ignore that old guy in the corner checking the time every 30 seconds.
I also used an HP3000
I endorse the "blink of an eye" thing. My guess is it probably depends on how your life went. For me, I always wanted a family. I was always told "don't rush it, don't worry. You'll meet someone". And in the blink of an eye I'm now ~60 and never did. Why? Because I followed their advice and didn't make enough effort. I kept thinking "there's always tomorrow" until there wasn't.
The point I tell my nephews is if you want to do something, do it now (or ASAP), because if you keep telling yourself "tomorrow" eventually tomorrow passes you by.
I endorse the "blink of an eye" thing. My guess is it probably depends on how your life went. For me, I always wanted a family. I was always told "don't rush it, don't worry. You'll meet someone". And in the blink of an eye I'm now ~60 and never did. Why? Because I followed their advice and didn't make enough effort. I kept thinking "there's always tomorrow" until there wasn't.
The point I tell my nephews is if you want to do something, do it now (or ASAP), because if you keep telling yourself "tomorrow" eventually tomorrow passes you by.
Thank you for your vulnerability and wise advice here. And I’d be willing to guess that your nephews have a ton of fun with you. :)
I've been 'designing' websites since about 1994, and I remember being very excited when the major browser(s) started supporting background images, so that my webpages didn't have to have the same flat-grey background that every other webpage in the world had at the time. I also made one of the first 'starfield' backgrounds, and was simultaneously thrilled and annoyed to see other people start using it on their webpages.
Oh, there was a neat way to create a starfield without background images: a dark background and then the content is set in a table with very small cells (where the main content uses colspan and rowspan to get a bigger cell). Some of the small cells can contain stars with transparent gifs. That way, some stars can even blink!
Found an example (though not surrounding content in this case): http://boom.shivas.se/natthimmel/natthimmel.htm
Found an example (though not surrounding content in this case): http://boom.shivas.se/natthimmel/natthimmel.htm
When I was a kid (in upper elementary school, around the same time period), I remember gleefully making star wars web pages with starfield backgrounds and light saber horizontal rules, and I wonder if I used one of yours
How about rotating logo gifs and fancy colorful banners? And applets!
I'm so old I remember the days before the web, when there were only mailing lists, USENET and gopher.
My first online post was in the 1980's, long before web browsers, on a mailing list called RISKS. I ended up meeting congressional staffers, Richard Stallman, and a host of other amazing characters as a result of posting on that list. I even had engineers at Fortune 500 companies track down my student office landline phone number and call me with questions about things I had posted. The net was a very different place back then.
RISKS was where anybody active in the emerging fields of computer security and the impact of computers on society met and exchanged ideas (the name RISKS came from risks of computers to society, and was moderated by a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute named Peter Neumann).
I'm sad for future historians of the Internet because it looks like the early days of the RISKS-FORUM Digest have been lost to network topology changes at Newcastle University and SRI. The earliest archives I could find just now went back to around 2000, but the heyday of the RISKS mailing list was actually back in the 1980's.
RISKS was where anybody active in the emerging fields of computer security and the impact of computers on society met and exchanged ideas (the name RISKS came from risks of computers to society, and was moderated by a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute named Peter Neumann).
I'm sad for future historians of the Internet because it looks like the early days of the RISKS-FORUM Digest have been lost to network topology changes at Newcastle University and SRI. The earliest archives I could find just now went back to around 2000, but the heyday of the RISKS mailing list was actually back in the 1980's.
In the same (old) boat. I ran email and USENET over UUCP before I had IP access for Gopher. Such a long time ago. In my area Gopher was free for everyone with a modem because the local university did not authenticate dial-in connections.
I did a lot of Pascal programming on I think a CDC6300 (?) at the university. If you could get to a terminal you could submit a compile job and wait for the operator to hand out your printed output. The system was case-insensitive and some terminals were all uppercase (of course monochrome, I guess 80x24 or so). So even minor typos took like 20 minutes to be reported.
I recently got curious about running a PC from floppies and found out I could get an external USB 3.5" floppy drive and boot a (I think) 2013 or so Thinkpad into DOS 3.3, with some doing. Managed to edit Lotus 1-2-3 with DEBUG.COM to remove copy protection. Of course much useful info to do this was on the web.
That was nostalgia also, but the old days with the terminals and line printer output were really something.
That was nostalgia also, but the old days with the terminals and line printer output were really something.
I'm so old that when the (single, rotary dial) phone rang, you dropped everything and went to answer it. No answering machine, no caller ID and no junk calls. If it stopped ringing without being answered, you had no idea who was calling or why.
I'm so old that when you called a company on that phone, a human answered. Every time. And that human was used to dealing with humans, and empowered to help.
Heck, I'm so old that when the (single, rotary) phone rang "with the wrong ring pattern you left it alone because it was for the other party on the party line.
Computer? At school maybe, and you debugged in your head over a printout you took home with you.
I'm so old that when you called a company on that phone, a human answered. Every time. And that human was used to dealing with humans, and empowered to help.
Heck, I'm so old that when the (single, rotary) phone rang "with the wrong ring pattern you left it alone because it was for the other party on the party line.
Computer? At school maybe, and you debugged in your head over a printout you took home with you.
I designed my first website in Adobe dreamweaver.
I was taught programming using an obscure language called LOGO that allowed moving a cursor(aka turtle) to draw shapes algorithmically.
128MB of ram was considered decent and if you could afford to plug in another 128MB of ram, you'd be able to use Windows XP for an hour or so before it freezes your computer.
I was taught programming using an obscure language called LOGO that allowed moving a cursor(aka turtle) to draw shapes algorithmically.
128MB of ram was considered decent and if you could afford to plug in another 128MB of ram, you'd be able to use Windows XP for an hour or so before it freezes your computer.
I'm so old I first accessed World Wide Web through email :)
Back in '96 I was browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service.
Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.idsoftware.com (Doom was big), which returned a gibberish of text to Juno's email client. It was an HTML file full of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)
I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.
Back in '96 I was browsing a computer magazine and happened upon a listing of useful mailing lists, one of which returned the contents of web pages for a requested HTTP address. Same magazine had an install CD for the free Juno email service.
Being a teenager, the first web page I ever requested was www.idsoftware.com (Doom was big), which returned a gibberish of text to Juno's email client. It was an HTML file full of IMG tags (one of those "Click here to enter" gateway pages), but I had no idea what I was looking at at the time. Somehow figured out to open the file in IE2 and saw... a bunch of broken images :)
I still vividly remember the sense of wonder that the early Internet evoked.
Ha! I did the exact same. I think I might have been using an MIT(?) web to email gateway.
When I started my first dev job in 2006 (I’d been developing websites for fun since the late 90s), Dreamweaver Templates were still very much a thing.
Later our designer would pass us a design built in Dreamweaver Templates and tables, and we’d spend a couple hours converting it into divs, floats and PHP.
Later still, we cut the middle man. The designer would hand us the Fireworks file he’d used to design the site, and we’d break the template into individual images and backgrounds.
What a world. I frankly kind of miss the highly textured, skeuomorphic sites. They could be a fun challenge to figure out the best way to slice and build, unlike these solid color beasts today that for some reason require css frameworks to pull off (har har).
Later our designer would pass us a design built in Dreamweaver Templates and tables, and we’d spend a couple hours converting it into divs, floats and PHP.
Later still, we cut the middle man. The designer would hand us the Fireworks file he’d used to design the site, and we’d break the template into individual images and backgrounds.
What a world. I frankly kind of miss the highly textured, skeuomorphic sites. They could be a fun challenge to figure out the best way to slice and build, unlike these solid color beasts today that for some reason require css frameworks to pull off (har har).
> Dreamweaver Templates were still very much a thing.
It's funny to see this technique get reinvented/renamed as "static site generators"
It's funny to see this technique get reinvented/renamed as "static site generators"
I miss skeuomorphic apps and websites. At the very least it tended to make more clear what was a button since the designer had to determine it at implementation time.
Image maps, man, IMAGE MAPS.
"Spacer" transparrent pixels.
"Spacer" transparrent pixels.
Adobe Air!
10+ years ago I was doing some work for a movie theater company and their POS system didn't have a "real" API except for buying tickets. The website sold tickets and used it to load showtimes. They then said they wanted to show the little screens above the theaters showing what movie it was, the poster, and the show times.
All of that was built with Adobe Air and it worked flawlessly for... years until they changed POS systems and it had that functionality built in.
10+ years ago I was doing some work for a movie theater company and their POS system didn't have a "real" API except for buying tickets. The website sold tickets and used it to load showtimes. They then said they wanted to show the little screens above the theaters showing what movie it was, the poster, and the show times.
All of that was built with Adobe Air and it worked flawlessly for... years until they changed POS systems and it had that functionality built in.
Reading this made my back hurt and reminded me to take my meds.
I'm so old that I remember websites often had right clicking disabled so people couldn't copy the page text or wreck their bandwidth by hotlinking images.
Today that is achievable by nesting the content inside 10 layers of overlapping divs so nothing of value can be selected and copied to the clipboard. Instagram does this, you have to go into Dev Tools and find the exact DOM node to save an image.
Today that is achievable by nesting the content inside 10 layers of overlapping divs so nothing of value can be selected and copied to the clipboard. Instagram does this, you have to go into Dev Tools and find the exact DOM node to save an image.
hard to hide from Developer Tools or Firefox's Page Info for media but sad that we've been pushed to this.
I'm not very old, but my very first computer was an Acer Note Light (40 MB RAM, 4 GB HDD, Intel Pentium III iirc) which I got in... 2005. Yes, third world problems.
Somehow I managed to upgrade it to Windows 98 and plug a CD burner to it via the printer port, which had a maximum speed of 4x. Did my very first website with it using FrontPage 95.
Dumb me screwed it trying to re-weld the power plug. I still miss it.
Somehow I managed to upgrade it to Windows 98 and plug a CD burner to it via the printer port, which had a maximum speed of 4x. Did my very first website with it using FrontPage 95.
Dumb me screwed it trying to re-weld the power plug. I still miss it.
All of this is from the mid 90's I think, so 30 years ago.
Before that, computers were generally not networked at all, or if they were it was netware (A world of suits), to share printers and storage, or possibly some telecom standard connection to run SNA to a mainframe (blue suits), or of course a modem to BBS for home users, or connecting to small business servers etc, which I remember well.
Before that, computers were generally not networked at all, or if they were it was netware (A world of suits), to share printers and storage, or possibly some telecom standard connection to run SNA to a mainframe (blue suits), or of course a modem to BBS for home users, or connecting to small business servers etc, which I remember well.
I'm so old that the most use image file on a website was "spacer.gif"
If you've build using tables, spacer was the most used asset.
If you've build using tables, spacer was the most used asset.
I technically started programming in the late 80s but I was just a kid messing around with BASIC making games.
I got my first job making websites in 98? Somewhere around there. So 2018 was when I reached 20 years, professionally.
I was making websites before then. I was at a hobbyist convention with my grandfather when I first saw the Mosaic demo that showed off the new image tag.
I got my first job making websites in 98? Somewhere around there. So 2018 was when I reached 20 years, professionally.
I was making websites before then. I was at a hobbyist convention with my grandfather when I first saw the Mosaic demo that showed off the new image tag.
Not as old as the author, but I remember a time when my family's home computer was slow. I went to the library and picked up a book on making Windows XP faster, circa 2007.
I really miss those kinds of books now. This book distinctly had color and screenshots of all the recommended changes to make.
I really miss those kinds of books now. This book distinctly had color and screenshots of all the recommended changes to make.
I'm so old I was a college student when Unix was being developed at Bell Labs. I'm so old I was in my 30's the first time I ever touched a computer and it was an IBM PC 5150 booting MS-DOS off one floppy drive and running Lotus 1A on the other...
I should really redo my website haha, I'm currently using several of the things in that list
I am so old that for many years I only had Z80, Timex 2068 BASIC and whatever came on magazine listings as software, besides pirated games.
Know why double deck tape recorders are usefull, what a tape and a pencil have in common, why rotary phones had long cables,....
Know why double deck tape recorders are usefull, what a tape and a pencil have in common, why rotary phones had long cables,....
I'm so old my first domain registrations were free. I had to register them via fax.
I'm so old, the first time I connected to a different computer was through a 300 baud modem. The Internet didn't exist yet, just BBSs. The local BBS scene was a blast. I'm still friends with several people I met back then.
One perspective on this is to compare how much our devices have changed over a given time period versus other aspects of our society and infrastructure. A lot of our assumptions outside of technology seem somewhat frozen in time.
When the first grunt plugin came out that could auto-generate a sprite map, that was love. Had been using images with the hover version offset out of view to avoid flicker on load for many years before.
I'm old enough to not only remember the first web servers, but remember when gopher pages sped up dramatically when switched to http servers.
And I was working then!!
And I was working then!!
About that funny gif - it would have been even more funny if the monitor would have been sitting on that desktop kind of PC like the icon represents.
I'm so old that I built my first modem out of scrap parts from an electronics dump. I used it in combination with my Commodore-64 to get access to BBS systems - internet access was a thing of the future - at the blazing speed of 300 bits per second/300 baud. Yes, here bits per second and baud are identical because those modems did not do anything fancy like QAM to push more than one bit into a state transition, it was beep-high or boop-low and that's it. Initially I had to dial the phone number using the rotary dial phone, wait for the beep on the other side, then switch the modem onto the line. I later built a pulse dialling circuit so I could automate this chore and go 'war-dialing'.
The computer at school was a Philips P2500, sturdy as a brick and about as dumb. It video circuitry was based around a Teletext chip so it could not do anything interesting. It did have floppy drives where my C-64 made do with a 'Datasette' (a cassette player chugging along at about the same speed as the 300 baud modem).
I build an analogue synthesizer based on plans published in the 'Elektor' magazine. It was monophonic and only had a single VCO (oscillator) but I wanted polyphony. I therefore changed the keyboard circuitry to add an interface to the C-64 to which I connected it using a thick cable with two D-25 plugs on each side. With the keyboard on a guitar strap around my neck, the C-64 in an attaché case on the floor running a synth program I could play it live.
Then I went to university where I met the PDP-11 and VAXen. Tried to produce a book using RUNOFF [1] but gave up after getting bored of waiting for the terminal to respond, instead using a system comprised of an IBM Selectric connected to a box with a cassette player in it which recorded what was typed and could regurgitate it line by line or character by character. A stack of tapes later the book was typed in upon which we needed to print it out to paste the output on stand sheets so of course the motor in the Selectric broke down. I managed to source another motor and eventually got the device running again after fighting the furiously complex mechanism for a weekend or so - realigning the thing so the correct letters appeared in-line without documentation was, let's just say, an interesting puzzle.
University is also where I got on the 'net, it is where I started off in forestry (it was an agricultural university) but ended up in IT.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5968126
The computer at school was a Philips P2500, sturdy as a brick and about as dumb. It video circuitry was based around a Teletext chip so it could not do anything interesting. It did have floppy drives where my C-64 made do with a 'Datasette' (a cassette player chugging along at about the same speed as the 300 baud modem).
I build an analogue synthesizer based on plans published in the 'Elektor' magazine. It was monophonic and only had a single VCO (oscillator) but I wanted polyphony. I therefore changed the keyboard circuitry to add an interface to the C-64 to which I connected it using a thick cable with two D-25 plugs on each side. With the keyboard on a guitar strap around my neck, the C-64 in an attaché case on the floor running a synth program I could play it live.
Then I went to university where I met the PDP-11 and VAXen. Tried to produce a book using RUNOFF [1] but gave up after getting bored of waiting for the terminal to respond, instead using a system comprised of an IBM Selectric connected to a box with a cassette player in it which recorded what was typed and could regurgitate it line by line or character by character. A stack of tapes later the book was typed in upon which we needed to print it out to paste the output on stand sheets so of course the motor in the Selectric broke down. I managed to source another motor and eventually got the device running again after fighting the furiously complex mechanism for a weekend or so - realigning the thing so the correct letters appeared in-line without documentation was, let's just say, an interesting puzzle.
University is also where I got on the 'net, it is where I started off in forestry (it was an agricultural university) but ended up in IT.
[1] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/5968126
I'm so old phreaking was the only way for me to communicate with people outside my area through BBSs on my C64.
You guys had web? We used DOS TSRs to read local compressed programming guides with hypertext links. And we liked it!
The 1x1.gif was the most versatile and common image on all my websites.
Perfect alignment of text and images every time!
Perfect alignment of text and images every time!
I'm old enough to have thought, "Hey, this Visual SourceSafe is a pretty great idea!"
Don't forget about the visitor counter perl scripts!
I'm so old, my first email address was ihnp4!chinet!ka9dgx
I've programmed PDP-11, Z80, 8086, 68HC11, i386 all in assembler.
I've programmed in a few varieties of Basic, Turbo Pascal, Fortran, PL/N, Forth, Excel (a declarative programming environment), and SQL.
I've repaired everything from 3 phase 480 SCR packs through Atomic Clocks.
I wrote a multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal, just because I needed one... back in the days of MS-DOS.
I wrote a Forth in Assembler for OS/2, just because I was told you COULD NOT write assembler programs for OS/2.
And yet.... it was only yesterday[1], I learned about Stack Frame Pointers, and their use.
There's always more to learn, and it's amazing. 8)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731824
I've programmed PDP-11, Z80, 8086, 68HC11, i386 all in assembler.
I've programmed in a few varieties of Basic, Turbo Pascal, Fortran, PL/N, Forth, Excel (a declarative programming environment), and SQL.
I've repaired everything from 3 phase 480 SCR packs through Atomic Clocks.
I wrote a multi-tasker for Turbo Pascal, just because I needed one... back in the days of MS-DOS.
I wrote a Forth in Assembler for OS/2, just because I was told you COULD NOT write assembler programs for OS/2.
And yet.... it was only yesterday[1], I learned about Stack Frame Pointers, and their use.
There's always more to learn, and it's amazing. 8)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39731824
>my first email address was ihnp4!chinet!ka9dgx
For those not familiar with bangs (exclamation points) in email addresses, there was a time when you had to include routing information in the address so your server would know how to find the destination server.
Each hop in the routing path was separated by a bang.
For those not familiar with bangs (exclamation points) in email addresses, there was a time when you had to include routing information in the address so your server would know how to find the destination server.
Each hop in the routing path was separated by a bang.
I still miss working in Macromedia Director.
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