Internet Turns 50

I lived on Ramona St in the 90’s back when Rolling Stone did an article on the Web heads of Ramona. I’ve met the guy who wrote Apache which is still one of the most popular web servers who was part of the Cyberorganic collective that sprung up there. He wrote Apache as a way to host the SF Raves list where the early parties were listed. It was a heady time when we thought that once information was freed from mainstream media -  democracy and freedom would sweep the world. The Berlin wall had fallen and apartheid in South Africa was coming to an end. Everything was possible.

Wow were we all so fucking wrong. I would happily go back to the days before. I think in all it has been a massive failure that has done nothing to make our lives better.

I hope the Internet has a nice day.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/01/business/pentagons-race-against-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepfake

I happen to know that the internet started in 1995 when I first got on.

In ten years, does the Internet buy a Corvette and get hair plugs and a trophy wife?

I think it was around 1993 when my friend’s dad got a computer and you could dial up the “world wide web”. Most of what I remember involved being fairly confused and underwhelmed. I mean - there wasn’t really any “content”, and we didn’t know anybody else on the computer to “chat” with, so it all seemed sort of pointless. It did however, have a talking parrot thing where you could type in questions and the computerized parrot would answer through the speakers. And a game we played a lot called monkey island.

There were bulletin board services (BBSes), the first of which was created in 1973 and functioned as the first online communities and forums. EIES (1976) and KOM(1977) were the first successful BBSes.

In addition to BBSes, USENET, a set of online newsgroups, functioned as online forums. USENET was created in 1979 and was active through 2000 and officially retired in 2011.

The WELL (1985) is the oldest currently active forum, although its membership is only around 2700 as of 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WELL

Used The WELL late 80's, early 90's, a friend would run it through his TV to communicate with other Deadheads, some may be Zoners now.

We got turned on in the early 80's with a 1200 baud modem(given to us by an older cousin that worked for IBM) and a phone line hookup that we paid for with our birthday money.  We initially had it on one of our families home phones but since it took 10 hours to d/l a couple mg game we all needed to pitch in to hook up a line. The 'server' was on 24/7 and we had constant traffic downloading all of our pirated software.  I still have the floppy disks backup of that drive.  I'm guessing that almost 40 years later and multiple moves that the disks wouldn't load. 

Thank You Al Gore...

I was living on the east coast for the loma prieta earthquake. I remember seeing the Wall St. Journal a few days after the quake. On the front page they just reprinted a bunch of posts from the Well with the people's user names. All the user names were things like Jack Straw, August West and Casey Jones. Years later I was working at Salon when they bought it, at the end of it's slow demise. I was also one of the people that ran the Bay Guardian BBS -  that was a thriving community of weirdos' The internet killed the BBS.  

The internet is an endless of stream of knowledge, entertainment and personal stories. Yet there is only one tiny clip that entirely encapsulates current day America. I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKfX-BXGr9M