Ray and the Internet

Back in 1993, I saw a tiny classified ad near the bottom of a page in the New York Post promising access to something called the "Information Superhighway".  I had seen a few articles in perhaps PC World, or the Science Section of the New York Times describing how the scientific project then known as "Arpanet", an interconnected network of mainframe computers could someday adapt itself to the PC world.  This advance would allow unprecedented access to computers around the world to which widespread access would have heretofore proved impractical.

I had already dialed into several bulletin boards, servers reached  by direct dial-up connection, to download drivers and read forum postings, but this offer of unlimited access to the "Information Superhighway" was extremely intriguing to me.

At the time, I didn't even have a decent PC, just an old used IBM PC Jr with like 256k of memory.  However, I did have a "dumb" terminal which allowed me to connect to my workplace to fix after-hours problems.

So I signed up with this place, something called which promised connectivity to this entire network of computers around the world.  At that time, given what existed, they sure didn't disappoint.  Through their interface or built-in text browser, one could navigate:

•  SIGs (Special Interest Groups) of all sorts

•  UseNet News Groups

•  IRC

•  Groups for programmers with their own downloadable programs (which I could not download on a dumb terminal - Once I got a PC, it turned out many of the posted downloads had those boot viruses that ruined your diskette drive by trying to continually write on a non-existent sector.

• Access to early tools like Gopher, Finger and TracerT

• Access to databases like the Library of Congress

• All sorts of "Easter Eggs" if you dug around enough
  
   My wife was unimpressed.  For that matter, despite my several years of mainframe programming at the time, I could not figure out how I could be sitting at a Unix command prompt in the public directory of the University of Bonn for the price of a local phone call!

      Similarly I was naive enough to just enjoy the ride.  Never occurred to me to buy any stock in these incipient companies involved in this computing wonder.  Never occurred to me to domain squat - buy rca.com and then a couple of years later claim it had great sentimental value to me being the initials of the first girlfriend that I had.  Was planning to build a tribute to her

No, it took me a while to realize the possibilities, a few years actually.  However, better late than never!

FYI: for DOS is still available here and is a valuable free tool for webmasters.  It gives you an idea how the search engine spiders see your website, in what order the HTML and text appear, etc.

Back