life online

[thomacycle]

Looking back on my life I think I actually liked the world more when I was youngster growing up in the 70s-80s-90s living a simple life without much tech/gadgetry but I don't think I could survive now without the internet. It was a total game-changer.

I do miss the simpler times in some ways, like spending more time outdoors with friends. But I also remember the frustration of waiting for information in the pre-internet era!

[Nearholmer]

I first encountered JANET c1980, and was a pretty keen adopter of the tech for work purposes, maybe because I’d already come across much earlier, and much more primitive, long-distance remote control systems, but am deeply ambivalent about the broader application and impact.

Maybe the generation that lives through any serious technological revolution is the generation that feels the impact most, can understand what has been lost as well as what has been gained by the change, whereas those who grow up with it from the start don’t feel the same about it.

I say “ambivalent” and mean it BTW, because although it currently feels as if the dominant result of communication via the internet is to spread foul-tempered hatred, and blatant untruths, and thereby division, I’m not sure it’s a certainty that that will be the long-run outcome. We don’t actually know which perspectives will win the culture wars yet.

[peetee]

37 is a good age, in some parts of Manchester!

I would aim to leave within 37 minutes.

[drossall]

My first job involved summarising and indexing technical papers, some of which discussed the underlying principles that were later used in the Internet. That was in 1981. I was working for a professional society, so we weren't allowed on JANET. My first experience of email was on closed, proprietary systems; they allowed us as suppliers to communicate with customers for whom the host organisation was a distributor of our information. Gradually, they opened up and allowed us to communicate, sometimes via arcane protocols, with email users on other systems as well. The memory of this brings home how radical the idea of Inter-net-working all these systems really was.

Only in 1994 did the Internet become available to non-academics, so I was involved in launching a Gopher server. Those went the way of the dodo within months, so I was involved in launching a Web site instead, initially repurposing the Gopher content that we'd only just created, and writing HTML with our bare hands.

Since then I've worked to various degrees with a list of CMSs, including but not limited to Sitecore, Umbraco, Kentico, Drupal, WordPress and a range of defunct ones, and CRM integrations.

[Nearholmer]

Only in 1994 did the Internet become available to non-academics,

When I first used it / played with it c1979/80, I was a part-time student at a lowly technical college, not an academic, and we had access in the evenings, after 7pm. IIRC, the machine we had remote access to was at UCL, but I might have that wrong.

I’ve just looked up when JANET went live, and that was 1984, so I think we must have been using the predecessor arrangement, which wasn’t actually very internet-like.

TBH, I quickly got fed-up with it once I’d persuaded my manger to buy a desktop machine, because the connectivity was so flaky that it was easier to do what I was trying to do locally.

Still not internet, or even internet-like, we were also using the British Rail TOPS, which had originally been developed by a US railroad, and in c1983 I got seconded to a dire job, involving oodles of traveling, to train people to use a remote stock-control system, which IIRC had its roots in the pioneering system developed by the Lyons cafe chain. It was the latter that really got me thinking, because it was an application of networking that was really changing the working lives of ordinary people, doing some of them out of jobs in fact, whereas in what I’d seen before, even remote control of power distribution, the impact wasn’t so obvious (with a longer-tun view, the impact had actually been exactly the same, but I didn’t spot that at the time).

[drossall]

... because the connectivity was so flaky ...

Around 1976, at school, the maths teacher brought in a massive dumb terminal and dumped it on the desk, with what I later learned was an acoustic coupler, and tried to connect us up to Manchester University's computer. Total connection failure.

[judythequeen]

This is all bringing back memories of the original pylonofthemonth website: https://www.pylonofthemonth.org/

[drossall]

The Cambridge coffee pot stands out to me as a site that helped to promulgate the concept that a Web page could be dynamic, rather than just a load of text and images.

If you can call a coffee pot dynamic.

[JerseyJoe]

I spent a week in Scotland with absolutely no signal. I could've cycled 19 miles to the local town to get WiFi, but to be honest a 40b mile round trip just wasn't with the effort! Really enjoyed my time 'away' from it all.

[Stradageek]

Arrived at work one morning to find a power cut had hit the site. Young lady next to me turned to me bewildered and said "what did people do when switching the computer on wasn't the first thing you did in the morning"?

She was amazed to hear that we wrote stuff on paper, drew graphs etc (twas an electronics research establishment).

[colin54]

The Cambridge coffee pot stands out to me as a site that helped to promulgate the concept that a Web page could be dynamic, rather than just a load of text and images.

If you can call a coffee pot dynamic.

I'd never heard of that , I found this BBC article about it, funny,

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20439301

[JerseyJoe]

Arrived at work one morning to find a power cut had hit the site. Young lady next to me turned to me bewildered and said "what did people do when switching the computer on wasn't the first thing you did in the morning"?

She was amazed to hear that we wrote stuff on paper, drew graphs etc (twas an electronics research establishment).

My first job was entirely a pen and notepad graft, I actually had to remember things in my head, couldn't imagine it now