Quoted:
If we're gonna do that I should have you all beat. I've been doing the internet thing when all there was was news, mail and gopher.
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Quoted: lol, that was a time ago.... I remember all those.... yikes.... and all with a 14.4 modem...
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I started out with a 300 baud phone coupler. When I bought my Mac Plus I thought I was shit-hot because I could get a 2400 baud modem for it. Mmmmmm...high speed.
Quoted: What the heck was gopher? I only used the internet to meet people in chat rooms...who would have thunk I would have married one of those weirdo's
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Gopher is/was a retrieval protocol. Kinda like google or yahoo except it would much more actively search for something than "modern" search engines. If you wanted something like a document with the word quantum in the title and the string "wave function" inside the doc it would go out and hit a bunch of servers and databases and retrieve all the docs that matched. It was great. The web and greedy academics killed it pretty much. Here's a couple of links. I have to see if I still have my original "internet" map. It's a one page ascii document of the entire Arpanet. I used to uucp into the MIT server and start rummaging around. People would see you on the machine and "talk" to you. You'd end up "chatting" with everybody from freshmen students to ancient professors. Things were much friendlier in those days. Except of course in news.
Here's a couple of gopher links.
The Wiki, of courseThe Gopher ManifestoHow to tell if you a nerd:
1. Your not offended when someone calls you a nerd. In fact, you generally say thank you when addressed this way.
2. You use words like, "digital compression" or "multi-generational tape architecture" in a sentence.
3. Your mouth doesn't feel funny saying words like "digital compression" or "multi-generational tape architecture".
4. You speed read technical manuals like they were the funny pages.
5. You spend time at family reunions comparing Play Station thumb with all your 8 year old cousins
6. You use the screen name "old_guy" on socom2 online and it really does apply.
7. When somebody asks you how many languages you know it takes you a couple of minutes to realize they mean spoken languages.
8. You think C++ is pretty slick but real programming means assembly.
9. You know the words splat and dot don't refer to stains or pen marks.
10. You haven't used a real writing instrument in years.
11. You have to use a cell phone to order pizza because both phone lines you have are in use by a modem.
12. You actually have friends on the internet, whom you've never meet, seen or spoken to in real life.
13. You identify most of the things on this list as applying to yourself.
ETA: I actually used the words multi-generation tape architecture in a meetng today. Nobody looked at me funny and most people were nodding their heads when I said. I just realized I work with a bunch of weirdos.